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Environmental management practices in most business organizations from the early 1990s were characterized by their focus on internal operations, cost savings, and compliance and risk management approaches. Such a traditional view of sustainability management, however, is not sufficient to address current business challenges – to create competitive advantages while contributing to sustainable development. There is a need for a life cycle management practice that expands the scope through including the complete value chain and that links sustainability management and performance of organizations and products to business value and value creation. Being an extremely powerful concept and process, life cycle management can ensure businesses deliver real-world improvements for all stakeholders. In the long term, it can also help to transform the market by making sustainability a differentiator just as quality is today.

Life cycle management is a business management concept applied in industrial and service sectors to improve products and services, while enhancing the overall sustainability performance of the business and its value chains. Life cycle thinking and product sustainability is operational for businesses that are ambitious and committed to reducing their environmental and socio-economic burden while maximizing economic and social value. In this regard, life cycle management is used beyond short-term business success and aims at long-term achievements. The term “life cycle management” has been confused with other uses in engineering and manufacturing (product life cycle management) and in software development (application life cycle management), in buildings, plants, information management and so on. There is a need to clarify this term and its definition more than a decade since the concept was first introduced. This chapter aims at elaborating the concept and definitions of life cycle management as currently found in literature and as extending it from focusing on implementation of life cycle sustainability assessment into business practice to include it as part of sustainable consumption and production strategies and policies. Methods and tools used and the general framework for life cycle sustainability management covering environmental, social and economic aspects in business practices are discussed in detail.

This chapter proposes a value creation framework to operationalize sustainability within organizations through an improved link between life cycle management tools and business drivers for value creation. Internal and external stakeholders’ need to be first identified and accounted for, and value creation must be clearly identified in order to be acknowledged and communicated. The question “what do we want to achieve?” needs to be answered before thinking how to best achieve the identified business value. We propose to apply “reverse-engineering” to define the value creation path and identify the departments and collaborators to be involved at different level of the organization. LCM offers an essential and flexible integrated management framework of concepts, techniques and procedures to think how to best operationalize sustainable actions to achieve the identified business value. The sustainability action involves a team that should include, at least a sponsor or a pilot from the department that is expecting final value creation (Human Resources – HR for employee engagement, marketing for product positioning, etc.) and a representative from each department involved in the value creation path. Each of them will need an LCM tool adapted to their need and specific objectives. Last but not least, one needs measurable indicators on global goals that are to be monitored by the overall project sponsor, through KPI (key performance indicators) and follow-up.

This chapter discusses how business can implement life cycle sustainability assessment into their management strategies. Life cycle management is a management approach that provides business a systematic way of managing their sustainability issues. The PDCA (Plan, Do, Check and Act) cycle is one of the quality management tools that can be used by companies to implement life cycle management initiatives in order to improve their sustainability performance. The relevance of the PDCA cycle is discussed to ensure a continuous performance improvement by setting and implementing a well-defined plan, checking whether the ambition goals are achieved or any adjustment actions are needed to continue the evaluation process.

Starting from the output ‘The Future We Want’ of the Rio+20 conference 2012, the main focus of this chapter is on social responsibility (SR) in the value chain. The historical context of SR is discussed, related to the international standards as are the Guidance on Social Responsibility and the Global Reporting Initiative, linked with the management of organizations and enterprises. It is emphasized that due diligence along the value chain is seen as a requirement for claiming ‘social responsibility’. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) contributes to the assessment and life cycle management (LCM) to the follow-up of exercising due diligence, all within the context of sustainable development. The over-arching LCSA is a combination of three different life cycle assessment techniques allowing to assess the impacts along the value chain: environmental LCA, social LCA and life cycle costing.

The focus of this chapter is on . Mandatory approaches are distinguished from voluntary ones; the chapter is focused on the latter. Based on ISO standardization work, this chapter differentiates between qualitative, quantitative and self-declared voluntary approaches. Section 2 presents an overview of different concepts and approaches as tools applicable within Life Cycle Management. Section 3 deepens relevant approaches by describing some characteristic elements. Section 4 elaborates on a hierarchy, whereas the final Sect. 5 summarizes the outcomes and draws some conclusions.

Although Life Cycle Management (LCM) is becoming commonplace in larger corporations it is far from mainstream. To achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns, LCM needs to be taken up by whole supply chains that include small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). From a business perspective, this represents a competitivity issue, as these SMEs are increasingly under pressure from clients and legislators to provide more information about the environmental impacts of their products, and to take responsibility for them both up and down the value chain. Therefore a sector based and regional approach is needed to foster the implementation of LCM in SMEs. This has been done in Northern France, where professional support organizations, including clusters, business federations and Chambers of Commerce, have come together under the auspices of the [avniR] LCA Platform to explore ways to help businesses to adopt LCM. Nine pioneer sectors, textile, seafood, packaging, mechanical, food, wood, construction, recycling and renewable energies, have undertaken an ambitious project to integrate LCM into their business. The methodology for all nine sectors follows five major steps: benchmark, sector maturity assessment, needs identification, action plan and implementation.

In general, companies start using a life cycle approach to manage the sustainability challenges and opportunities of their products through projects using life cycle assessment or other tools of the life cycle management toolbox like greenhouse gases accounting. As companies gain experience the way they manage the life cycle of their products matures, it becomes less about implementing projects and more about putting in place organization-wide procedures. The latter allow companies to address systematically the identified business challenges and opportunities of their whole portfolio or at least their key products with much less effort than carrying out multiple individual projects.

In this chapter we explore the need and opportunities to make the life cycle assessment (LCA) team more relevant for the business. Sustainability trends and alternatives for LCA are analyzed to identify what makes them relevant for and appealing to business managers, the difficulties LCA practitioners face to get their message across have been identified, and a five-step approach to make the LCA team a business partner will be described. The goal is to empower LCA teams and practitioners to create sustainable value for the business they work in.

Prioritizing sustainability as a key strategic focus and managing it similar to other parts of business such as marketing and sales, leading companies have been able to better identify and manage risks as well as enhance brand value and corporate reputation. With industry partnerships a holistic approach is possible. Common metrics, shared value chain data and joint sustainability management form the basis of a successful cooperation. Decision-making processes can be supported efficiently and influence the whole product system, thereby facilitating clear, measurable value creation throughout the supply chain. Industry partnerships with implementation of innovative business models are a key enabler for companies to realize more sustainable solutions.