Product sustainability was a hot topic at LiveWorx 2023, a four-day event centered around the ways product lifecycle innovations are driving business value.
The sustainability theme was prevalent across the Xtropolis show floor as well, with exhibits from both PTC and its ecosystem of customers and partners. One of these customers, Vestas, provided a powerful showcase around the value of a digital thread, offering daily demos to show how PTC software helps the company maintain its position as a leading wind turbine manufacturer.
Other PTC customers such as Cummins and Harpak Ulma shared insights into their own sustainability initiatives and progress they’ve made across their products and processes.
PTC’s employee champion network, Green at PTC, even had a booth that asked attendees to help decide which of three environmental organizations would receive a $15,000 donation from PTC. Over 250 attendees voted, with Conservational International winning out.
PTC's reduction commitment and expanded technology partnerships
The event's opening keynote featured several notable announcements regarding the future direction of PTC, including new greenhouse gas reduction commitments and expanded partnerships with Ansys and aPriori.
Sharing the stage with PTC’s CEO, Catherine Kniker, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, announced that PTC has committed to reducing its emissions through the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), joining a growing list of companies that are aiming to prevent the worst effects of climate change by committing to specific reduction timelines while working towards net-zero. PTC’s commitments were since validated by SBTi, adding PTC to the list of over 1,100 companies with verified net-zero targets.
In addition to the SBTi commitments, PTC announced two enhanced technology progressions that will help customers drive more sustainable design decisions. One is an integration with Ansys’ materials information management solution, Ansys Granta MI, that will make it easier for users of Creo and Windchill to assess how certain material selections will impact a product’s performance, embodied carbon, and recyclability.
In addition to integrating Ansys’ Granta solution, PTC also plans to integrate capabilities from aPriori into Windchill to let users review designs by generating reports on part costs, manufacturability, and environmental footprint. When designers need to improve certain aspects of a product, aPriori’s integrated technology will generate instant recommendations within Windchill, before design commitments with excessive costs or footprint are made.
Opportunities for manufacturers to drive product sustainability improvements
The sustainability content track at LiveWorx 2023 featured a variety of presentations and panel-style discussions that stressed the urgent need for manufacturing organizations to get serious about sustainability.
Why? As Dave Duncan, VP of Sustainability, noted in his spotlight session alongside Kniker, “for the Earth to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. Towards this, industrialized nations need to lead the charge, generally reducing emissions 50% by 2030 and then 50% every decade after that.”
To accomplish this, they explained together, manufacturers must drive meaningful product sustainability improvements across three areas:
- Using better and less material in products
- Using energy efficient methods in the production, logistics, operations, and servicing of products and goods
- Reducing the amount of waste incurred through the production, servicing, and end of life processing of physical products
As environmental regulations continue to evolve in the coming years, each of these areas will become increasingly important for manufacturers. The biggest opportunity to create impact, however, is within product design, where up to 80% of a product’s lifetime footprint gets determined.
“Design does have the biggest impact,” explained Duncan. “80% is the industry-benchmarked percentage, but our customers have told us anywhere from 65% to 85%. Most commonly, the embodied carbon within a physical product is its biggest impact. So, material supplier and component supplier selections are critical. So is using only the amount of material needed to meet performance and appearance constraints, as well as selecting the right manufacturing processes for the selected materials and components, and factory location.”
Technologies like CAD and PLM will be critical for engineering teams looking to develop greener products. Companies like Cummins are already utilizing solutions like Creo’s AI-driven generative design to cut back on material use and the associated costs. Beyond designing for sustainability, Duncan outlined several other avenues for reducing emissions, including data-driven energy management and an asset-centric approach to field service.
“We have evaluated several partner ThingWorx-based applications for energy management that are succeeding in the market,” he said. “Customers are seeing 10% to 15% energy efficiency improvements driven by the measures and insights of these applications. The level of data visibility also makes it feasible to get accurate product-level footprint data, which is increasingly becoming a sales driver for the more efficient manufacturers.”
For organizations that dispatch field service technicians, PTC’s service lifecycle management solutions can help technicians prepare for the job at hand and combine reactive trips with preventative maintenance while on-site, to avoid future truck rolls.
“ServiceMax not only optimizes technician routes, but through an asset-centric approach will only send technicians as a last resort. Much of the service may be done remotely,” said Duncan. “That’s a lot of embodied carbon saved on parts and Scope 1 tailpipe emissions avoided from technician trucks.”
Approaches to product sustainability that will scale next
As manufacturers look to increment sustainability improvements across the full product lifecycle, PTC’s portfolio of solutions will play a vital role by driving dematerialization, energy efficiency, and waste reduction.
“There is so much more we can do on materials,” Kniker explained in the track spotlight session. “Which materials we use, how much we use, where we source, and how we can reuse at the end of life. Our new partnerships will greatly enhance this capability.”
“We can also improve on how we reduce our energy requirements in manufacturing,” she said. “Which means making design choices that require less energy when manufacturing and leveraging IoT sensors and other information to ensure that we are manufacturing as efficiently as possible. The same is true for waste.”
Though LiveWorx 2023 has come to a close, many manufacturers are only just getting started on product sustainability initiatives. As many of the sessions, exhibitors, and attendees showed, there are many opportunities for sustainable innovation ahead of us.
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