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.

Klaus Brettschneider, PLM Green Global Alliance contributor and Director of Sustainability Solutions for SAP partner LinxAS, was invited to present his thoughts on “The Sustainability Thread: Designing Your Product Data Model to Drive Green R&D.” Klaus is uniquely qualified to speak about the intersection of PLM and Sustainability since his university education was as a Mechanical Engineer in Environmental Protection. In addition to his professional work leading SAP business partners and PLM implementations, he has gone on to volunteer his expertise and time with organizations like The Climate Reality Project, in addition to PLM Green, all while pursuing continuing education in corporate sustainability and innovation at Harvard.

Klaus’s presentation started with a refresher on the three interconnected driving forces of corporate sustainability, along with how they define the consumer’s valuation of sustainability and what level of business transformation will be demanded.

He went on to explain that the “Sustainability Thread” is not something altogether new, yet requiring another new digital infrastructure and software to support. Instead, it should be considered an important use case of any PLM implementation that has a requirement to support the Digital Thread and Digital Twin.

The presentation discussed how a virtual product model can provide design engineers with the structure and data to determine the environmental impact of design decisions in the performance of life cycle emissions assessments. Klaus also shared examples of companies that employed a digitalization strategy with virtual representations to comply with sustainability regulations like the UK Plastic Packaging Tax and EU product material declaration rules.

Now watch the just over 15-minute presentation below or later on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/882984495.

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Many across our PLM profession – especially a rising generation of younger environmentally conscious workers – expect that addressing sustainability requirements will end up being the most important use case of PLM they will see over their careers. Klaus closed his presentation by encouraging all of us to ask the organizations we belong to for more action towards sustainability as every step of progress, however small or large, across every industry of the global economy is needed.

Have a question, comment, or example to share about this PLM Green topic? Leave it below, email it to kbrettschneider@linxas.com or post it to our PLM Green LinkedIn discussion group.