Collaboration with external innovation drivers is one of the opportunities that companies, especially if belonging to more traditional sectors, can seize to embark on a twofold path oriented towards both a sustainable horizon and a Digital Transformation goal. This is the case of the Palescandolo Lavorazioni Siderurgiche, which works in the traditional sector of shipbuilding, in particular, providing steel beams and sub-assemblies to shipbuilders of the calibre of Fincantieri. In this context, the company developed a project (METROPOLIS) in partnership with the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Naples Federico II in order to exploit the potentiality of Digital Transformation to improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact. Once described the production system of the company and the main steps of the project, the aim of this paper is to show how the implementation of a Digitalization Plan represents a fundamental premise in order to allow the development of optimization-oriented approaches for operations management and the collection of data related to the environmental impact, making the latter become a new aspect that can guide decision-makers. In particular, we will analyse the opportunity provided by a DSS solution in managing objectives oriented on one side on efficiency and on the other side on sustainability, letting emerge the need for multicriteria approaches able to capture and drive the complexity of systems in which these objectives conflict.