From Design for Sustainability to Design for Value
In the latest conversation from the PLM Green Global Alliance Design for Sustainability Working Group, Matthew Sullivan (NCC) and Erik Rieger (PTC) welcomed back Pierre David (CIMPA PLM Services) to discuss how Design for Sustainability is evolving and what it takes to move it from isolated analyses into everyday product development.
Watch the Full Discussion
A central theme of the discussion was the shift from Design for Sustainability toward Design for Value. Sustainability should not be treated as another KPI or reporting obligation. Optimize environmental impact, cost, technical performance, waste, energy consumption, and other dimensions of product value together.
In practice, ecodesign can therefore create benefits beyond reducing environmental impact: it can expose waste, reduce costs, and improve product performance.
Moving from Measurement to Optimization
Industry has made significant progress in measuring environmental impacts through approaches such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The next challenge is scaling these methods from individual components and specialist studies to complete products, production systems, and development programs.
This requires finding the right level of data granularity, enough information to support meaningful decisions without turning sustainability assessment into an additional engineering burden.
PLM can play an important role in this transition. PLM already contains product, material, and design information, making it a natural environment for integrating environmental information into engineering decisions.
The discussion highlighted Environmental and Financial Cost Analysis Technology (FCAT) as an example of how parametric manufacturing-process models can give designers environmental and cost feedback while evaluating alternative materials, processes, and product designs.
Interestingly, environmental and cost models can share much of the same underlying structure and data. This reinforces the argument that sustainability, costing, and performance management should increasingly be considered together rather than managed by separate teams and tools.
The Next Challenge: Trusted Data Across the Value Chain
Looking ahead, technology alone will not solve the problem. Supplier data exchange, data quality, and trust are emerging as major barriers.
Companies need mechanisms to exchange environmental information across supply chains while protecting commercially sensitive information. Smaller suppliers also need practical methods and tools that let them participate without needing dedicated sustainability teams.
AI can support this evolution, for example, by continuously improving industrial models from operational data or helping evaluate complex products with thousands of components. But its benefits must be weighed against AI’s environmental footprint.
Looking Ahead
The discussion leaves the Design for Sustainability Working Group with an interesting challenge: How mature are today’s PLM platforms in supporting sustainability, and where are the gaps?
Developing a clearer overview, or benchmark, of sustainability capabilities across PLM solutions could be an important next contribution from the PLM Green Global Alliance.
About the Guest
Pierre David is an LCA & Eco-Design Lead and Sustainability Senior Consultant at CIMPA PLM Services. As an environmental engineer specializing in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and ecodesign, he helps industrial organizations, particularly in the aerospace sector, integrate environmental performance into technical and business decisions.
His work brings together sustainability, Design to Value, cost analysis, and product development, focusing on turning environmental insights into practical solutions for engineers and industry.
