Summary & Goals

In the last century our corporate business cultures and design engineering functions have been focused upon the well-known three dimensions of time, cost, and quality. As a consequence people, processes, and technologies were organized and optimized around these KPIs which became unrelenting drivers of new product development.

Now with the criticality of establishing a more sustainable global economy, it is imperative that design decisions include the fourth dimension of sustainability; what is called Design for Sustainability (DfS). The move to adding then prioritizing sustainability considerations promises to transform not just products, processes, and technologies, but also professions, organizations, and entire industries.

In contrast to other sustainability-related disciplines, DfS has an added burden of complexity: the design phase planning of a product must now include a prediction of its sustainability impact. This impact assessment may come from rigorous analysis using hard data or only estimates often relying upon extrapolations and comparisons.

These DfS decisions will ultimately determine the true sustainability of a product over a lifecycle that can run decades, including its repair, reuse, refurbishment, and recycling. Product data and usage information that is not complete in the early design stages must then be predicted, which becomes the “Dilemma of DfS”. The 80/20 Pareto Principle certainly applies where 80% of sustainability impact is defined during the first 20% of product life when much important data is still unknown.

Since we as an engineering community are still at the beginning of the transformation toward DfS thinking, our speed of implementation and standardization greatly matters. The goal of this new PLM Green theme and study group is to elevate and accelerate that transformation by sharing educational learnings, best practices, and real-world experiences across the three levels of:

• People – who need to understand, practice and transfer the culture of designing sustainable products
• Processes – which establish sustainable targets, even when the underlying performance and usage data is unknown in the early stages
• Technologies – which require data acquisition and prediction in a complex environment from numerous sources across departments, enterprises, and stakeholders

To accomplish this our group’s mission is to establish an open non-commercial forum of design engineering professionals from around the world who freely share their knowledge, experiences, and best practices that will boost the DfS transformation.

Theme Moderators

Dr.-Ing Erik Rieger, PLM Evangelist 

erieger@ptc.com

Focus & Objectives

Our near-term focus will be on exploring how best to take advantage of “PLM Levers” for supporting design for sustainability, and defining what new advancements in PLM-enabling capabilities, implementations, and user applications will be needed.

To be successful, DfS will require the following challenges be addressed, most which are ideal for PLM business strategies and software solutions:

• Continuous data gathering and updating from numerous sources across the entire product lifecycle. In particular, data sources from material databases, supply chains, and manufacturing planning/operations has to be taken into account followed by best data-handling practices to seamlessly integrate the data into design workflows. This includes approaches for creating and maintaining digital or virtual twins.
• Tool landscape for sustainability, which allows rapid changing software tools to be analyzed according to their functional capabilities and assessing their fit into individual enterprise requirements for given product characteristics.
• Predicting data from actual product life history and feeding that back into the early design phase has to be incorporated. Generalizing data to check and validate early assumptions and estimations also has to be performed.
• PLM enablement toward Green PLM systems, which support transparency of sustainability impact in all maturity phases of the product. This includes functional capabilities, such as comparing variants for assessment of change impact, rolling up sustainability from single components to the entire product, and managing sustainability for variant design in complex structures.
• Leveraging DfS for compliance reporting will require transparent verifiable reporting against regulatory standards right from the beginning. This will help to enhance the importance and investment of DfS initiatives.
• Maturation and standardization of design processes and KPIs to support sustainability best practices, include training on sustainability-integrated design processes across disciplines like requirements planning.
• Closing the loop of the entire life cycle to leverage lessons learned from the other PGGA research areas such as Life Cycle Assessment.and Circular Economy.

Agenda & Activities

We propose in our DfS theme working group to exchange experiences, thought leadership, and most importantly, professional encouragement to amplify our voices and accelerate our actions.  As in the other PLM Green themes, we will do so by educating, advocating, and collaborating across the boundaries of technical disciplines, different industries, and international borders.

We will pursue these objectives using a plan composed of several elements that may include: commentaries, use cases, virtual round-table discussion groups, blog posts, book and paper reviews, recorded interviews, industry surveys, and participation as guest speakers in conferences and webinars hosted by others.

No one association, business group, or NGO, regardless of how large or small, can produce all the advancements in sustainability that are urgently needed. Thus communicating, cooperating, and collaborating with other professional groups, organizations, and alliances will be needed which we enthusiastically look forward to pursuing.

Invitation to Participate & Collaborate

To participate in our PLM Green theme study group on DfS, we invite you to first, if you have not yet done so, join the PLM Green LinkedIn Group then contact our moderator Dr.-Ing Erik Rieger at erieger@ptc.com to share your area of special interest and expertise.

Announcements & Updates

Check back soon to this website page as we announce activities for 2025, or register HERE to receive our news, updates, and announcements of events.

References & Resources

Here below we have started maintaining a curated list of featured white papers, blog posts, presentations, case studies, webinars, and interviews on Design for Sustainability. For inclusion in this library we invite you to send us examples you have come across in your own work, company, industry, or country to info@plmgreenalliance.com.