The following post was first written by PLM Green co-founder Jos Voskuil where it  appeared in his European PLM Weblog in December 2022.

We are excited to close the year with the first round of the PLM Global Green Alliance (PGGA) series of interviews and panel discussions about PLM and Sustainability.

Over the past year of this series, my fellow PLM Green contributor Klaus Brettschneider and I interviewed a number of PLM-related software vendors to discuss their sustainability mission and offering. So far we spoke with SAP, Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, Sustaira and Aras. These recorded interviews with additional commentary can be found HERE.

This time, it was an insightful discussion with the global PLM mindshare leader PTC where we began talking about their Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) history and ended with a hint about what’s coming next year.

PTC

Our discussion was with Dave Duncan, Vice President Sustainability at PTC, focusing on industrial sustainability as well as PTC’s internal footprint reduction programs, joined by James Norman, who globally leads PTC’s Community of Practice for PLM and Design-for-Sustainability.

Interesting to notice from this discussion, listen to the introduction of Dave and James about their personal history with sustainability long before it became a buzzword. Then note how long it takes before the role of digital threads and digital twins are mentioned. Watch the just over half-hour interaction below.

Slides shown during the interview, combined with additional company information, can be found HERE.

What We Learned

• It was interesting to learn that just before the financial crisis in 2008, PTC had already begun to invest in lifecycle analysis solutions. But, unfortunately, the COVID economy paused this activity until a little more than six months ago when sustainability begun to show up in the top three priorities of PTC customers.
• Regulation and financial reporting are the most often-cited business drivers for companies to act related to sustainability.
• The digital thread, combined with the notion of relying on data quality, are transformational aspects.
• Another transformational element is connecting sustainability as an integrated part of product development instead of a separate marketing discipline.
• Early next year we can expect to hear more about the realization of the PTC Digital Twin and its role in sustainability.

Where to Learn More

To learn more, here are some links to the topics discussed in our meeting:

• The Innovators Program
• The Cummins Case Study
• The PTC Digital Twin description
• The PTC ServiceMax announcement

Concluding Thoughts…

It was great to finish our interview series this year with PTC. I hope readers following this series have received a solid initial understanding of where PLM-related solution providers are headed regarding their support for a sustainable future.

Next year we plan to follow up with these and other providers – big and small, old and new – to look more closely “under the hood” at their software tools, methodologies used, and customer use cases.

To receive notices of future interviews and panel discussions, follow the PLM Green Alliance on LinkedIn and subscribe to our PLM & Sustainability News Digest.