2016 Volume 12 Issue 2 Pages 71-76
Challenges of energy efficiency, resource efficiency and in general sustainable development play a more and more important role in corporations and supply chains. In response to these challenges, organizations increasingly reason about implementing life cycle assessment based information instruments. The principal purposes of these instruments are ex post documentation and justification, but there is a growing concern that such an orientation may not be sufficient when the instruments should support internal decision making, in particular with regard to the improvement of internal processes. In the first part of the contribution, we want to develop a specification of a decision support instrument that provides information about the relationship between the improvement of internal processes and interrelated cost reductions and increasing resource efficiency. The second part shows that material flow cost accounting（MFCA）is an appropriate, coherent and stimulating implementation of such a specification. A special feature of MFCA is that it encompasses both the starting position and possible improvements within a single model. The most important keyword in this regard is material loss.
