If you want to make sustainable products today, dabbling at the edges no longer suffices. You must start at the design phase. For example, 80% of a product’s lifetime emissions is determined by product design.
Achieving sustainability demands a transformation of thought. While 86% of companies have a sustainability strategy—with 73% of those set on a net-zero carbon emissions goal—only 35% act on that strategy. Backward-looking initiatives, like retrofitting products or alternate maintenance schedules, can make a dent in the collective footprint, but it’s forward-looking initiatives that make lasting change.
Designing for sustainability (D4S) will never practically deliver a net-zero environmental impact, but there are five principles that can help companies make a meaningful impact on their sustainability strategies:
Successful development of increasingly complex products demanded today is only possible by adopting an integrated development lifecycle management approach. This approach frees up development resources from repetitive and mundane tasks to focus more of novel solutions, provides more data insight that will open new design opportunities and improves the collaboration within and between teams to explore alternative approaches.
It’s important for industries to adopt a key metric of sustainability in their design and development efforts. This metric must have the same weight as time-to-market, cost and profitability.
Let’s consider aerospace as a case study. We know that airplanes are heavy and inefficient, but how do we avoid, and reverse, the roughly 4% they contribute to climate change? Understanding the inherent and lifetime challenges at stake, Honeywell Aerospace designed an innovative thermal management system that is 300 times lower on the Global Warming Potential.
By adopting a sustainability mindset and leveraging IBM’s Engineering Lifecycle Management, Honeywell:
As a result, Honeywell’s innovative solution delivered 35% lighter and 20% more efficient than conventional units, leverages a less polluting refrigerant, while improving their time-to-market and lowering development costs. Honeywell Aerospace plans to adopt this comprehensive development strategy more broadly across a variety of projects.
Organizations combining commitment to sustainability with execution capabilities—and integrating this effort with digital transformation—create win-win situations. For example, while Honeywell’s design was for aircraft sustainability, their technologies will change the way we commute for work and pleasure, enabling people to move 50-100 miles away from their places of work. The effect is collective and societal.
IBM is committed to helping clients adopt and leverage best-practices of integrated development lifecycle management. Offering an integrate portfolio for managing requirements, workflow and testing, as well as systems design modeling. This toolset offers a federated data approach which optimizes information sharing and leveraging across the entire development lifecycle, makes data and processes transparent and traceable, enables better regulatory and compliance adherence, and provides better data currency to improve critical business and development decisions.
Learn more about IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management