Which LCA Software Should I Choose?
There is no single best LCA software for every company.
The right choice depends on your LCA experience, use case, users, data, workflows, required functionality and budget.
If you're completely new to LCA, however, choosing software probably shouldn't be your first decision. Build some practical LCA capability first; then you'll be much better equipped to identify the software you actually need.
So if you are new to LCA and want to get started, the question to begin with is different from when you know exactly which software features you need.
1.-How should my company get started with LCA?
If your company is new to LCA, don't start by choosing software. First understand LCA, decide whether to build capability in-house or outsource it, involve the right people, develop the necessary skills, and gain practical experience conducting LCAs.
Once you understand what doing LCA actually looks like in your organisation, you'll be in a much better position to select software for your long-term needs.
The right question in this situation would be “how can my company get started with doing LCA’s?”. The question about which software to choose is one part of the answer.
So to get started with doing LCAs, the best path to follow would be as to answer the following questions, all of them:
What is LCA, do we need it, and what business benefits would it bring? Get a basic understanding of what LCA is, how it works, what the process steps are of doing an LCA and what business benefits LCA’s would bring to your company One way to get this basic awareness is joining our free webinars, another is taking our short Corporate LCA Basics training, which is available both for groups and individual students.
Should we do LCA’s in-house or outsource them? Decide if you want to do LCA’s yourselves in your company or use consultants (or a mix of both). If you have lots of products or your products are constantly evolving, then building in-house skills is probably a good idea. This enables you to use findings from LCA studies for eco-design and it is often also more cost-efficient. On the other hand, if you only have a few products and they don’t really evolve over time, then a consultant may be the easier option.
Who needs to be involved in LCA in our organisation? LCA requires input from beyond the person doing the assessment. Figure out who owns the relevant data, who needs to understand the results and which teams and leaders need to be on board. Make sure you get leadership & organization buy-in. This is crucial regardless of which choice you made in the previous step, because whoever does the LCA will need to understand your manufacturing processes, raw materials, how your products are distributed, used and (hopefully) recycled etc. Help your leadership, procurement team and product designers understand what LCA is all about by offering them some basic awareness-level education, such as our Corporate LCA Basics group training
What skills do we need for doing LCA’s in-house? If you go for the in-house option, decide who will actually do the LCA’s. This could be people from product development or your sustainability team, for example. Then get the needed education for those people.
What does conducting LCA studies actually mean for us? Have your first LCA(s) done, and learn what that means in practice, for your whole organization, not just for the persons doing the LCA’s. Our Hands-on LCA training program covers the practical LCA skills both in theory and in practice, as all our participants will complete an LCA as part of the training program.
Which LCA software best fits our needs? Yes, that is still a relevant question after all, once you have that initial experience. When you understand your users, data, workflows and requirements, you can evaluate software alternatives based on what you actually need. You will now be more equipped to decide on which software you want to commit to, long term. This is a big decision and for that exact reason it is important to not take it too early in the process.
How do we integrate LCA into our processes and scale it? Once the foundations are there, look at the bigger picture: processes, IT systems, data flows, doing LCAs at scale, and where additional support might be needed
2.-Which LCA software best fits our needs?
There is no universally “best” LCA software. The best choice depends on your use case, required functionality, users, workflows, data requirements and budget.
If you already understand how to conduct an ISO 14044-compliant LCA and know what functionality matters to your organisation, comparing software is the right next step. So in this case asking which software is the best is absolutely the right question.
You might reach this decision point because you’re an experienced LCA practitioner, but you might also reach it after going through the earlier steps we’ve just described and getting some practical LCA experience.
You want to identify which LCA software is the best one for the specific needs of you and your business. Keep in mind what functionality is important for you, how many people will use the software and why, how much budget you have available etc. Look at multiple options, don’t just compare the two or three best known (oldest) alternatives.
As an example, we use Earthster in our Hands-on LCA training program, because of a few reasons that are important specifically to us:
It is cloud native. There is no need to install anything on your local computer and it works for everyone.
Very user friendly and intuitive user interface, excellent for beginners. In our Hands-on LCA training, we've found Earthster's interface particularly suitable for beginners because students can start modelling without needing to understand its more advanced functionality first.
Visual. You see your environmental hotspots with a quick glance and you see what causes those impacts. In our experience teaching LCA, this visual feedback helps learners connect changes in their model with changes in environmental impacts.
Super fast, instant display of new results based on whatever change you make to your model.
The ability to define a “learner” role for students, create model answers to exercises, and have Earthster automatically check submitted exercises against those model answers
Earthster does have other features too, such as uploading your BOM, making LCA’s at scale in different ways etc., but those are not very important for us, for learning purposes
…so for our educational needs, Earthster has proven to be an excellent choice.
If your needs are different, then another software may be better for you. Whatever your needs are, make sure you compare multiple alternatives and make sure you give the appropriate level of importance to the features you actually need.
For our educational needs, Earthster has proven to be an excellent fit. Your needs may be different, which is why we recommend comparing different options based on the functionality that actually matters to you.
That’s also why our Hands-on LCA training program is software-agnostic, in the sense that the methodology and practical skills you learn can be applied regardless of which LCA software you ultimately choose. We teach you how to do LCA, not simply how to operate one particular piece of software.
During the training, you do get access to an Earthster Corporate licence. This means you can use Earthster to complete your LCA and find out through real experience whether it works for you.
If it does, great! You’ve tested it properly before making a longer-term commitment. If another software ultimately fits your organisation better, the LCA skills you’ve built come with you.
Because software is a tool. Knowing how to do LCA is the capability.
Build the capability first, and choosing the right tool becomes a much easier decision.
Get started on your decision making journey about LCA, download our LCA implementation roadmap
