The need for a computational structure of LCC

Excerpt

The opportunities for cost reduction often lie beyond the company gates, i.e., along the supply chain. The same happens with regard to the environmental burdens: Porter and van der Linde (1996) claimed that organizations should trace their own and other life cycle actors’ emissions and disposal activities back into company activities to gain insight about beneficial product design, raw material, or process changes. Thereby, integrated supply chain management (SCM), life cycle costing (LCC), and analytical environmental management tools like life cycle assessment (LCA) are based on similar holistic approaches (Seuring 2004a). Their common objective is to allow, to a different extent, upstream and/or downstream processes to be included within the boundaries of the manufacturing system being analyzed. This combination of the involved supply chain actors’ viewpoints is called a life cycle viewpoint. For the purposes of eco-efficient management of manufacturing systems, it is desirable to seek synergies among the aforementioned tools. From an environmental management accounting (EMA) perspective, such synergies are expected to focus on the identification and exploitation of both internal and external linkages along the industrial value chain. This is not warranted by the current practice of combining separate environmental and economic analysis, mainly based on LCA and LCC, respectively. …