The Flow of Sustainability Information Through Interorganisational Shipbuilding Ecosystem

Abstract

<h4>Marine industry is a complex and unique field of industry with a supplier network of possibly over a thousand separate tier 1 suppliers and contractors. While the CSRD regulation will create pressure on the bigger companies, the need to supply the environmental information will be passed on to all levels of the supply chain. When discussing the sustainability of the cruise ship construction process, including but not limited to environmental impacts, it is essential to understand the complexity of the value network and its possibilities to utilize information sharing in the interorganisational network.This paper introduces an interview study of various shipbuilding network companies. In the interviews a number of company representatives with expertise in sustainability, LCA, business processes, and information systems were present. The aim was to gather the information from the participating companies’ understanding and knowledge of LCA and sustainability in general, existing sustainability information, methods of acquiring sustainability information, standards and practices used, data quality, quantity and formats, and the internal flow of data through the company processes. The level of knowledge about environmental matters varied significantly among the interviewed companies and individuals. This is natural as the companies represented actors from different stages of the supply chain and varied greatly in size. Some of the common challenges recognised were lack of common naming systems and missing automatic data flow. The companies had various amounts of environmental data gathered either from their own suppliers or other data sources such as open emission databases for materials.The companies in the shipbuilding network have vastly different amounts of environmental data and are in different stages of environmental maturity and understanding. Some material producers have published many environmental product declarations, some companies have evaluated some of their products and some have made calculations based on general available data. The value chains in the marine industry are fairly long and therefore linking the environmental data between companies would bring benefits for all members of the value chain. However, producing reliable environmental data always has a price and there is the question of how to make it beneficial to provide environmental data, for example increasing the economic viability and marketability through sustainability actions.Due to the siloing of data and information in various systems in many of the participating companies, intraorganizational interfaces concerning sustainability data have a tendency of being handled with manual labour. As the IS solutions in use are not always all-covering ERPs but the sustainability information, especially LCA data, is stored in excel sheets and pdfs, the flow of the sustainability information is often being restricted. Some interviewed companies were quite active in the process of generation of new data. Yet that information tended to have a limited amount of connection to the product information itself in IS level and was handled through manual work. Even though in many cases this manual work is not cumbersome, it is more susceptible to human errors and is not as updatable as automated handling of information flows throughout the organization.</h4>