A Study on Social Assessment in Holistic Lifecycle Management

Sustainable manufacturing has been focus of the industry for some time. Due to the holistic nature of sustainability not only the manufacturing processes but the whole life cycle and the environmental, economic and social aspects of the product should be taken in to account. In order to leverage from the concept of sustainability it is necessary to involve it in decision making process in the supply chain. It is essential to have an evaluation procedure so as to involve it in decision making which should be capable of assessing economic, environmental and social performance of the product. Unfortunately the social dimension of sustainability is the least developed and even neglected because it is difficult to evaluate due to its quantitative and subjective nature. The social aspects of holistic life cycle approach will be presented in this paper.