As manufacturing organisations work to align their operations with global sustainability expectations, the integration of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into production systems has become increasingly important and a critical pathway toward Industry 5.0. Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (Sus-VSM) provides a structured approach for assessing economic, environmental, and social performance, but its practical adoption remains limited, and it has not been systematically aligned with SDG Targets. These limitations are particularly evident among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which often lack the resources needed to implement extensive sustainability indicator sets. This study combines a systematic literature review with industrial evidence to identify Sus-VSM indicators and examine their use in practice. A consolidated set of 18 economic, 22 environmental, and 18 social indicators is derived and mapped to 16 SDG Targets relevant to manufacturing by means of a Delphi-based expert assessment. The mapping results are analysed to evaluate indicator usefulness and expert agreement and are complemented by an industrial verification from 30 companies across different sectors that rates each indicator in terms of relevance to SDGs and applicability in real factory contexts. The results show that economic indicators are most aligned with SDG 8, environmental indicators with SDG 9, SDG 12, and SDG 13, and social indicators with SDG 3 and SDG 8, while gaps persist for water, energy transition, and some climate-related Targets. A prioritised indicator set is proposed that maintains coverage of the selected SDG Targets and remains feasible for SMEs, providing a practically oriented basis for embedding SDG-aligned sustainability assessment within Sus-VSM.
Stadnicka et al. (2026) studied this question.