“The key to understanding and mitigating a product’s environmental impact lies in data from the full product lifecycle. Unfortunately, traditional PLM systems are less able to serve as the single source of truth. For example, when looking at the increase in front-end data, these software platforms often fall short of companies’ aspirations to bring together all required data points. Most legacy PLM systems are just not built to effectively handle today’s volumes of data.
This situation, however, seems to be changing. PLM software vendors have started taking the necessary steps required to close the data gap. The latest generation of advanced PLM platforms is proving to be more capable of facilitating product optimization across dimensions such as user experience; ease of manufacturing; maintainability; and environmental, social and governance performance.”
“If we are going to avoid, or even mitigate, the devastating effects of anthropological climate change, then, in the next twenty to thirty years, we’re going to have to almost completely wean ourselves off our reliance on fossil fuels. That means reducing 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero while providing an acceptable standard of living for 10 billion people. This is the greatest engineering challenge that our species has ever faced and essentially means re-solving every difficult engineering problem that we have overcome in the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution.”
“In the title of this article, I blamed engineers for the climate emergency. After all, Savery, Newcomen and Watt’s inventions unintentionally prised the lid off of the Pandora’s Box of greenhouse gas emissions. This is a deliberately provocative (and rather trite) argument. The Industrial Revolution (like the Neolithic Revolution before it) was an inevitable consequence of human population growth and would have happened eventually, irrespective of the individuals involved. Like most modern engineers, like you and I, they were just trying to improve the world that they lived in.”
Digital Engineering published the following commentary written by Robert Farrell on “The Intersection of Product Lifecycle Management and Climate Change” in the February 2021 issue which featured the PLM Green Global Alliance.
Until recently, initiatives to advance sustainability and combat climate change have primarily focused on improving product performance to minimize energy usage and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is enabling technologies and supporting software applications that are contributing to the greening of our global economy in many ways.
