In 2011, the international organisations launched the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Framework for experts from different disciplinary fields to discuss and develop a holistic and integrated approach that supports effective sustainable development and sustainability decision-making. In response, various authors have used combinations of sustainable manufacturing methodologies and approaches to support this goal. This paper used a structured approach to a literature review to systematically examine sustainable manufacturing approaches between 2006 and 2015, and the move from segmented assessment methods to the holistic and integrated Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis. The analysis of the identified 54 relevant contributions indicated 68.5% of the articles focused on sustainable product development techniques, whereas 31.5% on sustainability assessment techniques. From the second, 70.4% of these were segmented approaches while only 29.6% incorporated the three sustainability dimensions. Further, the analysis showed that the energy aspect was incorporated into all the approaches, and there is a dearth of holistic approaches to sustainable manufacturing. Additionally, the paper initiates a theoretical framework that will underpin the development of a holistic simulation-based analytical framework that integrates goals that support progressive sustainable product development with methods that focus on the holistic quantitative analysis of the three sustainability dimensions.

Making an effective sustainability decision at every stage of a product life cycle is key to achieving a holistic sustainable product development. The extant literature highlights the challenges and lack of effective tools for determining the impact of manufacturing processes on the environmental, economic and social dimensions, as well as the interdependence of the outcome of one dimension on the other. This research paper identifies methodologies, tools, and approaches that can be integrated into a single descriptive framework to enable both assessment and analysis of the aspects of the three sustainability dimensions. The paper also details the development of the framework using inductive methods and conceptual synthesis of key sustainability approaches and a Delphi study involving panels of international researchers and practitioners in the field of sustainable manufacturing. The framework can provide a platform for both practitioners and sustainability analysts to build impact analysis models that will support effective sustainability decision-making. It will also enable a clear perspective of the required elements, processes and indicators that need to be considered in sustainable manufacturing design and assessments.

The relevance of adopting environmentally friendly manufacturing process to economic development has been studied and established in many research. Empirical studies have also confirmed that organisations adopting green technology or clean production are benefiting from increasing economic growth and job creation. However, the studies of the benefits of social development to economic growth and manufacturing sustainability have not been adequately captured or itemised in the literature. With the aim of contributing to this research streams, this paper applied the principles of social economy and reciprocity, and the theories of motivation and social exchange to guide the integration of social aspects into sustainability analytical equations. The Herzberg two-factor theory of motivation was adopted to classify the negative and positive social impacts of the workers' stakeholder category. Further, the approach aligns the Herzberg extrinsic factors with the negative and regulated social aspects and intrinsic factors with the positive and unregulated social aspects. This contribution provides an initial theoretical framework that will enable practitioners to capture and calculate the social impact coefficient of an organisation. The result can be used to assess the social impacts on productivity, and corporate social responsibility towards the employees. It will also provide an input for analytical or simulation models to assess the consequential effects of social aspects on other sustainability dimensions.