Full transparency about configurable products
Client
Offering your clients environmental information at the point of purchase is crucial for enabling informed and more sustainable purchasing decisions. But what if you’re not selling just any product, but a complex product or system that is configured to each client’s unique specifications? In that case, the standard environmental footprinting approach becomes impractical. It’s simply not feasible to generate reports for every conceivable variation of the product. Recognizing this challenge, Siemens Energy partnered with PRé to develop the EcoTransparency app, designed to accommodate the many different configurations of their energy transmission products.
About
Siemens Energy is committed to making sustainable, reliable, and affordable energy a possibility. Their mission is to empower customers to meet the increasing global demand for energy and progress towards a more sustainable world.
Challenge
In the upcoming years, the emphasis on delivering sustainable energy solutions and navigating the energy transition will be crucial. Siemens Energy specializes in products for energy generation and provision, from turbines to circuit breakers and more. Often, these products are highly configurable. Since customers increasingly want to know the environmental footprint of the energy products they are buying, meeting this demand for accurate and transparent product footprint data is an important challenge.
The environmental impact of energy products is typically communicated through Environmental Product Declarations (EPD). This approach does not serve highly complex and configurable products such as energy transmission devices, since these have an extensive range of product variations that differ from customer to customer. Customers want to understand how their choices during the configuration phase impact sustainability. However, there is often minimal reliable data available during this phase. For that reason, Siemens Energy joined forces with PRé to create a solution that turns Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) knowledge into business value for the entire energy value chain.
Solution
Siemens Energy and PRé developed the EcoTransparency App to make it easier to purchase sustainable energy transmission devices. This tailored solution uses LCA to assess the footprint of product variations and makes the results tangible for Siemens Energy customers.
The analysis takes many factors into account: material composition, manufacturing processes and transport, customer-specific operation conditions, service, and end-of-life. The results are analyzed and presented in a format that is easy to interpret. With the EcoTransparency App, users can compare different product variations, do a life cycle deep dive, and download LCA reports for each product variation.
The EcoTransparency App integrates with the SimaPro Footprint Platform to calculate the impact of product variations. Primary data parameters such as local energy mix, recycling rates, materials, and end-of-life scenarios are provided by the user and exchanged via application programming interfaces (APIs). At the core, the app uses configurable LCA models maintained by LCA experts. This ensures that every analysis adheres to the applicable standards and that the app delivers output that comply with laws and regulations. As a result, each calculation is grounded in facts, comparable and auditable.
Benefits
The EcoTransparency App presents a number of benefits:
- Siemens Energy can easily inform their customers about the environmental footprint of each product variation. This enables strategic decision making that supports the customers’ sustainability targets. Customers can, in turn, disclose this information for marketing and communication purposes and regulation compliance.
- The Sales department at Siemens Energy has a tool to pitch decarbonized solutions for customers.
- Product Management and R&D departments at Siemens Energy can calculate product- and project-specific greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under varying scenarios.
Our collaboration with PRé on the EcoTransparency App marks a significant leap forward in fulfilling our sustainability commitment. We can now create business benefits for Siemens Energy and our customers by translating LCA results into customer-specific cases. The App provides detailed insights for both sales and product development leveraging the existing product models by adding interactive scenarios. Collaborating with PRé has proven to be a productive and insightful learning experience.
Dr. Falko Parthey, Head of Environmental Center of Excellence at Siemens Energy