Tag Archives: Product Lifecycle Management

CIMdata Thought Leadership on PLM and Sustainability

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PLM Green Global Alliance participant Mark Reisig from CIMdata has authored a comprehensive thought leadership paper on PLM and Sustainability.

In his signature paper, Mark details the defining challenge of our time for technologists, engineers, and innovators to decarbonize the global economy to minimize greenhouse gas emissions that are quickly warming the planet. And to do so while we still have time – this decade – before the worse effects of climate change are experienced or planetary tipping points breached.

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PLM Green Announces Life Cycle Assessment Theme

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The PLM Green Global Alliance (PGGA) announces that a new focus theme on Product Life Cycle Assessment has been established to be led by PLM Green founding moderator Klaus Brettschneider.

PLM Green’s mission is to educate, advocate, and collaborate across the boundaries of technical disciplines, different industries, and international borders to advance the use of Product Lifecycle Management strategies and technologies in the transition to a sustainable decarbonized circular economy. There are many applications of PLM that can contribute to this transition which PGGA has begun to study as referenced in PLM Green Examples.

Due to the wide variety of these PLM use cases, the PGGA originally created four core topical themes on examining the application of PLM within Sustainability, Green Energy, Circular Economy, and Climate Change. Each special interest group is led by one or more volunteer moderators that presently includes Jos Voskuil from TacitIT, Klaus Brettschneider from LinxAS, Mark Reisig from CIMdata, Patrice Quencez from CIMPA PLM Services, and Richard McFall from PLM Alliances. The PGGA also acknowledges theme contributions from Ilan Madjar of XLM Solutions, Hannes Lindfred from TrusTrace, Bjorn Fidjeland from PLM Partners, and Lionel Grealou from XlifeCycle.

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Dassault Systèmes Introduces Life Cycle Assessment Solution

VELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France — February 24, 2022 — Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: FR0014003TT8, DSY.PA) today announced the launch of “Sustainable Innovation Intelligence,” its life cycle assessment solution that enables companies to minimize the environmental impacts of the products, materials and processes they create and help drive the circular economy. Fully embedded in Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform and covering the entire value chain, the cloud-based solution uniquely integrates the ecoinvent database on the impacts of more than 18,000 industrial and agricultural processes, into virtual design, product development, manufacturing engineering, operations and logistics.

Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes at https://www.3ds.com/newsroom/

“Collectively building a sustainable economy requires transforming the sustainable innovation process, from extracting raw materials to usage, reuse and recycling,” said Florence Verzelen, Executive Vice President, Industry, Marketing and Sustainability, Dassault Systèmes.  “Whether in manufacturing, infrastructure and cities or life sciences, data science experiences that combine LCA capabilities with virtual twin technology offer companies new ways to innovate by understanding how their decisions affect natural resources, ecosystems and health.  Through our 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we aim to help companies contribute to the United Nations’ ‘Decade of Action’ and thrive while doing so.”

Many businesses are working to reduce emissions in line with climate science and are aiming to develop more circular business models by 2030 by redesigning their product lines and manufacturing systems. However, most business solutions on the market today are still focused on measuring the footprint of yesterday’s economy, retroactively. To drive disruptive sustainable innovation, companies need to integrate ecodesign principles in the upstream thinking about their future products and processes before there is any environmental impact in the real world. Virtual universes provide this opportunity.

By combining LCA data with virtual twin technology, “Sustainable Innovation Intelligence” will empower LCA specialists, industrial designers, product engineers and manufacturing engineers to create circular life cycles by setting up sustainability requirements early on and collaboratively driving them throughout the design, product development and manufacturing engineering phases.  It integrates supply of materials, design, manufacturing, operations, logistics, sales, marketing, and end-of-life management, providing real-time insights that allow teams to identify problems or improvements virtually before acting on them, and ensure traceability and reliability.

“Sustainable Innovation Intelligence” relies on the life cycle inventory database of the not-for-profit ecoinvent Association, whose datasets measure and provide information on the natural resources withdrawn from the environment, the pollution released into water and soil, the emissions released into air, the products demanded from other processes, and the products, co-products and waste produced in diverse sectors on global and regional levels.

“Our partnership with Dassault Systèmes is the first one with a software company in which our database is used at the very beginning of the product and manufacturing engineering processes for sustainability assessments,” said Emilia Moreno Ruiz, Interim Director, ecoinvent Association. “LCA brings the metrics needed to evaluate environmental impacts across the product lifecycle.  Integrating that with virtual twin technology opens new possibilities to address these impacts early on.”

Read the original press release HERE.

Sustainable Product Configuration from Configit

This timely post from Configit explores the role of Configuration Lifecycle Management solutions in creating a more sustainable future where customers will have the product data necessary to make low-carbon choices. The authors write:

“In a Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution, the software parameters are set as the customer makes selections in the configuration process, ensuring the software configuration matches the customer requirements. Configuration Lifecycle Management is about ensuring all functions in an organization have an aligned view on the product variants that can be sold and manufactured. In a CLM solution, the technical features of a product are linked with the commercial features using rules. Traditionally, this means that sales and marketing will introduce parameters that represent the customer requirements and link them to the technical capabilities of the product….Carbon footprint can be added as an additional commercial feature that needs to be linked to technical information on the carbon footprint impact of each component used in the product.”

Read the full post on the Configit website HERE.

The Role of PLM in Tracking Carbon Footprint

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In Part 1 of this series of posts from the PLM Green Global Alliance on the Role of PLM in Slowing Climate Change we identified four primary opportunities to employ Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in reducing, mitigating, or adapting to climate change from human-generated Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, most importantly CO2. These four areas for using PLM strategies and solutions are in: developing Green Products, generating Green Energy, reducing Carbon Footprints, and adapting to Climate Change.

In this new Part 2 we will begin to examine one of those in more detail; the use of PLM-enabling technologies to collect, calculate, track, report, and most importantly reduce the carbon footprint of products and processes. This capability then enables a full and accurate accounting for the carbon footprint of individual companies, entire industries, and national economies that supply, produce or consume these products or services. It may very well prove to be the most important contribution of PLM by helping to lower emissions and slow climate change for the benefit of future generations to come.

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