The topic of sustainability was high on the agenda of the SAP Product Lifecycle Management Info Days event held this past September in Hershey, PA, just west of SAP America’s HQ outside of Philadelphia.
Most SAP customer presentations at the annual event referenced the growing need to provide product data to support their company’s sustainability programs and business goals. Likewise, many informal conversations over breaks and meals also touched upon green topics.
Since our start in earnest in 2020, the PLM Green Global Alliance has participated in discussion panels with solution providers Aras, Autodesk, Dassault Systems, PTC, SAP, and Sustaira. In these interviews our focus was to learn about their thought leadership, products, and experience implementing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to support Sustainability initiatives.
Our last interview earlier this year was with a PLM consultancy representative, Mark Reisig, who is a Sustainability and Green Energy Practice Director & Executive Consultant at CIMdata. You can find that interview here with a recording we encourage you to also watch.
From PLM Green Global Alliance’s (PGGA) European co-founder Jos Voskuil.
During May and June of this year I wrote a guest chapter for John Stark’s book Product Lifecycle Management (Volume 2): The Devil is in the Details. The book is considered a standard in academic and professional circles when studying all the many aspects of PLM.
This month we are pleased to feature a guest blog submitted by PLM Green Global Alliance follower Roger L. Franz. who shares a few things he has learned as a Principal in Engineering Information Technology when beginning to explore the state of PLM tools to Design for Sustainability.
Design for Sustainability is now a mainstream requirement from governments, regulators, and customers. In this brief we summarize some current trends in the area of PLM tools to support rapid engineering assessment of environmental footprint among the many engineering choices. Engineering and science-based tools to quickly guide hardware engineers toward material selection and product configuration choices with reduced environmental footprint are critical to our future.
This post was written and first published in May 2023 by PLM Green co-founder Jos Voskuil in his European Virtual Dutchman blog about PLM.
Last week I enjoyed visiting LiveWorx 2023 on behalf of the PLM Global Green Alliance. PTC had invited us to understand their sustainability ambitions and meet with the relevant people from PTC, partners, customers and several of my analyst friends. It felt like a reunion.
This month we are taking a pause from the typical format of the PLM & Sustainability newsletter to ask PLM Green followers for their valued input in a one-question survey that will help guide our initiative forward.
The paper “An Approach to Sustainable Product Lifecycle Management (Green PLM)” is one of the earliest references to the concept of Green PLM. The paper was first presented at the 2015 Manufacturing Engineering Society International Conference (MESIC) and subsequently published in the journal Procedia Engineering.
The authors C. Vila, J.V. Abellán-Nebota, J.C. Albiñanaa, and G. Hernández write in the abstract “Sustainable development has been, is and will be one of the worldwide main issues. Many initiatives have been launched to drive global conscientiousness to the problem of the impact of manufactured products. In order to become a “green company”, eco-brands and recycling are well understood but many initiatives are in silos and the unintended wasteful impact to other activities in the company is not always noticed. The key of sustainability also covers all the in-between activities and it depends on a real commitment of society, research and manufacturing firms. The factory of the future must have a Green Product Lifecycle Management strategy sharing responsibilities within the whole supply chain that must be achieved through committed people. The present work describes an approach to green product lifecycle involving mainstay phases: design, manufacturing and service, including usability and renewal. The contribution suggests a framework for sustainable product development that takes the whole product lifecycle into account.”
The paper examines the mission, vision, and objectives that a green or sustainable PLM strategy should have. From this approach a framework model is developed for use in the assessment and implementation of green strategies. This includes discussion of the knowledge, architecture, methodologies, tools, and processes needed over the product lifecycle stages of design, manufacturing, and service.
Download and read the paper from Science Direct HERE.
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.
The PLM consulting firm CIMdata writes in their commentary PLM is Green: “The Critical Role of PLM – In complying with the increasing number and complexity of green regulations and requirements, too much is at stake to rely on manual operations and analyses performed late in development. For a growing number of companies, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) enabling technologies and processes are becoming indispensable in optimizing a product’s greenness.” Read more HERE.
In this whitepaper on “Redefining Product Lifecycle Management in a Circular Economy” from Tata Consultancy Services the authors write that “Companies can move to a circular economy by implementing the 5R approach (reduce, reuse, repurpose, remanufacture, and recycle). This shift will drive sustained growth, and impact how Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) capabilities are defined, implemented, and measured.” Read more HERE.
In this article on the Circular Economy and PLM from Technia the author writes “At Technia we are looking into developing the PLM tools that will enable companies to switch to a fully circular approach…PLM systems should serve as a major help for companies looking to switch to a circular (economy) model.” Read more HERE.
