Total Cost Assessment Methodology

Total Cost Assessment (TCA) is a sophisticated risk/rewards management method that incorporates broad social, economic and environmental forecasting into complex, forward-looking decision models.

By analyzing risk factors such as the potential for future environmental mandates (e.g. CFC abolition), or the impact of sexually transmitted diseases on workforce retention and training, or potential scarcity of key raw materials due to political instability, corporations, institutions and governmental agencies are able to integrate long term planning to achieve the most sustainable outcomes, reduce legal liabilities, avoid potential supply chain disruptions or other forms of unpredictability yeilding a functional risk assessment through probability analysis and situation-specific, customized alternative modeling scenarios.

EarthShift pioneered TCA, offering the most sophisticated and probing workshops, identifying areas of strength and weakness that might otherwise be missed and then analyzing with the TCAce software. These TCAs give key decision makers the tools they need to justify various forms of investment in long term planning and commitments to socially and environmentally responsible corporate or institutional activity.

An example of how an EarthShift TCA leads to positive economic and sustainability outcomes was a project we undertook for a large international materials corporation with significant infrastructure and operational investments in South America where HIV/AIDS transmission rates were running at epidemic levels. EarthShift’s analysis helped to show how employee attrition of both skilled and unskilled labor through illness and death threatened the long term viability of those operations, and how the incurred costs of AIDS education and health clinics were an economic net positive over time.

In another instance, an EarthShift Total Cost Assessment was used to investigate a Japanese effort to evaluate and compare risks associated with a biofuels production process comparing ethanol produced from raw crops to methane from waste materials. The TCA was able to demonstrate that the methane from waste was the most cost effective, and the by-products were usable by the local farming community as compost.

The ability to evaluate costs that include social, economic and environmental criteria lead to superior outcomes in profitability, health and safety, and community relations… to name a few.

EarthShift: a leader in sustainability consulting, training and software.