Towards the ethical awareness integration on industrial performance management systems

Abstract

Industrial performance management can be seen as a decision-making process that aims to ensure the performance, results, and utilization of resources towards the achievement of a set of pre-settled objectives. Essentially, this model assumes that the objectives and allocated resources are related to the cost, quality, and delivery criteria under efficiency, relevance, and effectiveness constraints. However, the scope of this model is currently questioned due to the development of the Industry 4.0 initiative and the emerging risks for the human wellbeing and the society, basically since it could be extended to current needs. Industry 4.0, where digital transformations, smart systems and a profusion of data are given place, would offer scenarios in which the company, human and society sustainability can be threatened. Therefore, including the ethical notion on the use of the technological advances is considered fundamental against potential risk, such as data privacy mismanagement, surveillance policies, discrimination, and automated judgement. As a first step of the inclusion of ethics in the industrial performance management, this paper focuses on the basic elements of the performance model that are the objectives, the means or resources, and the results of the performance management. For this, it introduces a set of requirements that defines the ethical awareness of basic elements. The methodological approach taken on this study is an explorative and interpretative research, constructed collectively by a set of researchers and industrial practitioners, based on previous works on ethics. This set of requirements will serve as a benchmark framework enabling companies to compare their performance from an ethical-aware perspective and launch plan of actions to reach the proposed standards.