Supporting Sustainable Product Design with Engineering Data Management Capabilities

Abstract

Today, innovations are no longer defined just by technical progress but also, in particular, by environmental aspects (such as carbon gas emissions). The issue of reuse is also becoming increasingly central to purchasing decisions and is forcing manufacturing companies to deal transparently with environmental impacts. This is also receiving a lot of political attention and is underlined by increasingly far-reaching regulations on sustainability, such as CSRD, Product Declarations, Transparent Supply Chains, Substance Compliance, etc. Since 80% of the environmental impact is already determined in the early product development phases, there is a high potential for improvement. This is where engineering data management approaches (such as PLM) come into play as a systematic approach to data, document, and information management. Many KPIs for determining the environmental impact are often already available in PLM. Still, it is necessary to bring them into context in a targeted way to support early qualitative and quantitative evaluations in the engineering phases regarding the current environmental impact of the design. The paper, therefore, presents a concept based on PLM-available data along the product engineering process for assessing ecological impact. This includes the product life cycle (and the supply chain) as well as the prototypical provision of environmental information and is demonstrated using platform technology by CONTACT Software.