Sustainable New Product Innovation With PLM Software

By Siemens Industry, Inc.

Getting the right mix of sustainable projects incorporated into your product portfolio is an important first step to achieving sustainability objectives for your company. Brand and portfolio owners must incorporate analytical criteria that will enable them to select the best possible sustainable product initiatives, balanced with cost saving and brand alignment objectives that reflect an acceptable level of business risk.

To facilitate this strategy, your company can manage these initiatives with portfolio management capabilities that are integrated into a PLM platform. This approach provides several key business advantages, including:

• Aligning business criteria with your corporate sustainability objectives to achieve the right balance of risk and reward.
• Improving your new product concepts by tying cost estimates from your supply chain into your development process instead of strictly relying on historical costs. To facilitate sustainability, new materials and ingredients may need to be reflected in your cost structures.

PLM enables you to establish and leverage a single source of product and production information across your entire enterprise. The scope of the green product development lifecycle is from idea to shelf. Solid PLM capabilities are available to support your sustainability initiatives at each step of the way, including:

• Sustainability claims. You might be working with a non-governmental organization (NGO) and using their certification logo or creating eco-labels to support a sustainability brand position.
• Environmentally friendly formulas. Formulators may be called upon to reformulate your products using more environmentally friendly ingredients. Full visibility into the latest regulations and requirements, including rapidly changing food safety requirements and chemical restrictions for REACh compliancy, can be held and applied from a PLM platform.
• Green packaging. Package designers need full visibility into green requirements for new projects, as well as the ability to rapidly iterate and prove out light-weighted and reconfigured designs.
• Source local. Supply chain managers may be asked to source more locally to achieve a better carbon footprint while adhering to specification and quality standards. PLM’s ability to track supplier capabilities with up-to-date certifications helps ensure you are optimizing your current supply base and its costs, while still meeting your local sourcing requirement.
• Factory simulation. PLM’s ability to quickly generate what-if scenarios that optimize factory productivity ultimately enables you to reduce energy consumption.