Life Cycle Management as a Way to Operationalize Sustainability Within Organizations

Abstract

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.