Today’s process industry is facing severe business conditions, such as mega-competition, and increased market uncertainty. In the circumstances, a life cycle oriented approach, which evaluates and makes decisions based on expected profit through plant life cycle, is critical as a new management principle in the process industry. In the plant life cycle consisting of planning, designing, construction, operation, and disposal, the planning and designing phases are the most important because about 85% of the life cycle cost is determined by the decisions made in these phases. For this reason, a process synthesis approach, which generates profitable process systems at the conceptual planning phase based on decisions considering plant life cycle, is essential to manage profitability under today’s business conditions. In this paper, the life cycle oriented process synthesis approach which establishes a process plan at the conceptual planning phase so as to maximize the expected profit through the plant life cycle in consideration of capacity, life, availability, reliability, and maintainability of each process unit, and future process scenarios, such as expansions, modifications, and shutdown is proposed. In addition, a heuristic process synthesis procedure for this approach is proposed. The effectiveness of the life cycle oriented process synthesis approach and the proposed process synthesis procedure are demonstrated. In addition, areas of further research and development related to the life cycle oriented process synthesis are addressed.