The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an ambitious step towards sustainable development, addressing a variety of stakeholders worldwide such as governments, private companies, or research institutes, to work jointly and cooperative for the SDG achievement on an international level. Yet challenges remain, for instance on how the SDGs can be addressed and contributed to by private companies, and how this can be measured. This is of interest within the field of sustainable investment, where business contribution to Sustainable Development is evaluated to support decision-making about investments, following different methodologies. Such assessments, as done for instance by rating companies or investment companies, most often follow a certain idea and design, certain tools, and a rating (of evaluation points) methodology. In the following, a framework was designed that catches up the idea of designing a comparable and effective Sustainability Assessment (SA), based on measuring and evaluating business contribution to the SDGs, for the use within the context of sustainable investment. The development of the framework will be based on redesigning and enhancing an existing ESG-based Sustainability Assessment framework from a case company evaluating sustainable performance of manufacturing companies. This framework seeks to enhance understanding on which assessment tools or characteristics are effective, how the framework can be categorized, how to address the SDGs, including how to select and match indicators and which rating method to choose. The study focus is narrowed down to design a non-sector-specific tool for assessing manufacturing companies in Europe time-efficient and holistically.