Written by Tom Gill
CSR Blog The theme for CIMdata's 2022 PLM Market & Industry Forum series is "Sustainability: PLM Essential to Facing this Global Challenge." Sustainability has gone from one of many topics in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs to a global imperative. Leading PLM software and service providers are defining the needed metrics, measurement approaches, and enabling technology for their industrial clients. Those clients are pushing toward the "triple bottom line," assessing CSR efforts based on impacts on people, the planet, and profit. With this in mind, let's consider how well industrial users are achieving their sustainability objectives.
PLM strategies and solutions define, build, and manage much of the built world and the smart connected entities within it. PLM has a central role in any systemic response to this crisis. Recent CIMdata research helps document industrial firms' actions to achieve their sustainability objectives.
Sustainability concepts and requirements have been growing for decades, formally in the US, since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formation in 1970. As consumer awareness has grown, businesses have significant pressure to clean up. No one wants to or should have to live in or near a toxic environment. While carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions are the most discussed, there are many other aspects to sustainability.
CIMdata recently executed a sustainability survey to understand better how industrial companies are addressing sustainability requirements. Most respondents view PLM solutions as important or essential. Most respondents also recognized that their supply chains are essential or important to enabling sustainability optimization. Unfortunately, MCAD was seen as more important than simulation, MBSE, digital thread, digital twins, and IoT to achieve goals. To be successful, companies will need to do much more than model products geometrically, so there is obviously a significant educational opportunity for academia, consultants, and solutions providers to improve industrial companies' understanding of what capabilities a PLM solution must have to address sustainability requirements.
CIMdata believes that a holistic PLM solution, connecting data and processes across the entire lifecycle using an MBSE approach that leverages digital threads to deliver digital twins, is the best-in-class solution to meeting sustainability requirements.
In the session on Meeting Sustainability Objectives: The Industrial Perspective at CIMdata's 2022 PLM Market & Industry Forum, we will share research findings on industrial firms' actions to achieve their sustainability objectives.
The 2022 PLM Market & Industry Forum will be a live event in Ann Arbor, MI, USA, on March 31. A series of virtual-live events will follow, each held over two half-days designed to share the same information in the following geographies, EMEA on April 5 & 6; India on April 5 & 6; China on April 12 & 13; and Japan on April 14 & 15.
Key takeaways from this presentation will include:
- Regulatory requirements, customer demand, and financial/investor demand from the top-down by the C-level drive company motivation for sustainability.
- While sustainability goals are important to meeting requirements, companies need to build sustainable solutions to address changing requirements and deliver products that meet sustainability requirements.
- CIMdata’s survey shows that the importance of PLM is recognized but shows less recognition of the importance of simulation & analysis and MBSE.
- Digital twins of the product, production, and operations/performance will make it much easier to develop strategies, tactics, and remedies to optimize for sustainability requirements.
Please let me know your thoughts on this topic by sharing them in the comments section of this blog!
Tom
