Business Challenges in the Sustainable Innovation

For the sustainable innovation, it is important that you integrate sustainability management at the core of business strategy, planning and implementation. Most often, companies face some of the following challenges on their journey of sustainable innovation.

• Inability to define and view sustainability metric targets for:
  • Product and its sub-systems
  • Product lifecycle (From design to release, from raw material extraction to recycling)
  • Human activities involved during product life cycle.
• Lack of traceability in identifying the activities, parts, and life cycle phase that has the highest environmental footprint.

Performing Life Cycle Assessment using Sustainable Innovation Manager role

To develop sustainable products, you must have a clear understanding of the environmental impact of product during its entire life cycle i.e. from design to release, from extraction of raw material to final disposal. Sustainability assessment is required to forecast and minimize negative environmental impacts of manufacturing, using, and recycling of the product.

The Sustainable Innovation Manager role allows you to set sustainability goals, and visualize the sustainability metrics of products and processes throughout their life cycle. It also provides the decision-making analytics that aide in faster decision-making to achieve your sustainability goals. The following are some of the important apps in this role that lets you perform life cycle assessment.

• Sustainability Assessment
• Business Target Definition
• Business Values Definition
• Business Activities Definition

The following image shows a simple process that explains how you can perform life cycle assessment of your products using the Sustainable Innovation Manager role:

                            Life cycle Assessment using the Sustainable Innovation Manager role

1) Define Environmental and Weight Targets

The “Business Target Definition” app allows you to set up the goal and scope definition i.e. you can set up “Target Value”, “Minimum Permissible Value”, and “Maximum Permissible Value” for all the environmental metrics depending on the environmental method you’ve chosed.

For example, with the EF 3.0 environmental method, you can set up these values for the 16 key environmental metrics such as CO2 emissions, ozone layer depletion, water use, land use and more.

Setting target values for the environmental metrics using Business Value Definition app

You can set up these targets for the main product and then cascade the targets to sub-system (parts) level as well.

Note: The Business Target Definition app supports the following five environmental methods to perform life cycle assessment: IPCC, EF3.0, ReCiPe, EPS, TRACI.

2) Apply Human Activities

The ecoinvent association publishes the world's most consistent and transparent life cycle inventory database. This database enables you to gain a deeper understanding of the environmental impact of the products and services. The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform seamlessly integrates with the ecoinvent database to let you calculate the environmental footprint. The human activities in the ecoinvent database calculate the impact of the various activities carried out during product life cycle phases such as transportation of the material, manufacturing, and recycling.

The weight of the product and it's parts is the key contributing factor to calculate the score of the sustainability assessment. The calculated or declared weight during the design phase of the product seamlessly integrates with the activities from the ecoinvent database.

The Business Value Definition app allows you to assign human activities to the product or specific part in the product structure. You can select a part and assign these activities to one or more life cycle phases shown in following image:

                               Life cycle phases to which the human activity can be assigned

Note: A human activity in this case is an action done by  the person that influences environmental metrics and footprint. Human activities are categorized based on International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) concerning various economic sectors that contribute to the environmental footprint.

    Assigning Human Activity available in the ecoinvent database to the relevant life cycle phase

                    Different human activities assigned to ABS Plastic Frame’s life cycle phases

3) Create Custom Human Activities

Along with the 18000 activities already available in the ecoinvent database, you can create your own custom human activities as required. The Business Activities Definition app allows you to create custom human activities affecting environmental footprint. These activities can be assigned to the product or its part. These activities are also helpful to enrich the database and can be used for future projects.

                    Creation of the new custom human activity in Business Activities Definition app

You can add the formula to calculate the contribution of the activity to the environmental footprint. This formula can be estimated, computed, declared, or measured. You can also assign tolerance and confidence value to the activity formula as required.

4) Declare Environmental Impact

Most often standard parts like fasteners are procured from the supplier. Supplier may have already performed life cycle assessment of these parts and you can reuse this assessment by declaring values of the environmental metrics (For example: CO2 emission) in the Business Value Definition app.

                        Declaring the environmental metrics in Business Value Definition app

5) Assess the result and perform trade-off studies to select best alternative

The Sustainability Assessment app provides you interactive and intuitive decision making analytics that let you analyze the impact of products and processes on the environment metrics.

Overview tab

The Overview tab in the Sustainability Assessment app shows you the Environmental Footprint and the Weight value of the selected product or its part. Color code indicates whether the value is within the set permissible limits or not.

                                    Overview of the Weight and Environmental Footprint values

Structural Distribution Tab

In the Structural Distribution tab of the Sustainability Assessment app, you can see a pie chart that shows the contribution of each part (Sub-system) within the assembly and it’s environment metric value.

                                        Structural distribution of the environmental footprint

Analytics tab:

The Analytics tab in the Sustainability Assessment app allows you to view analytics for the phase-wise distribution, environmental footprint breakdown, and most impacting human activities. The Sankey diagram shows the top ten human activities contributing to the selected environmental metric.

               Sankey diagram showing impact of human activities on the environmental footprint

Performing trade-off studies:

You can create revisions of the products and compare their environmental impact to take better decisions and comply with the set environmental footprint targets. The “Add to Comparison” option in the app allows you to begin the comparison. The spider chart is displayed that shows the comparison of each environmental metric value of the selected revisions. You can click on any of the metric to view the result in the bar chart form.

              Spider chart showing comparison of each environmental metric value for 2 revisions

                    Bar graph showing comparison of environmental metric value of 2 revisions