Digital continuity in the era of sustainability
Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals has become a major challenge for all industrial sectors. Aerospace, automotive, energy, consumer goods - all are scrutinized, at least in part, on their societal and environmental impacts. Each sector must now transform quickly enough to meet these new demands. Digital Continuity will be a major driver of change.
The early 2023 publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is just one of many urgent reminders to integrate these sustainability objectives into organizations.
The demand for sustainability adds an extra layer of complexity for companies, generating stronger interdependencies for products and services around energy performance, carbon footprint, repairability and recyclability - not to mention the multiple social and societal dimensions of their design, manufacturing, delivery to the end user, repair/maintenance, and end-of-life management.
This increasingly sustainable world drives industrial and product performance towards low environmental impact. Some sustainability approaches are integral, due to companies’ CSR commitments (eg. waste management) or because they are directly linked to operational performance (eg. optimizing energy consumption).
As with digitalization, long program cycle times can mean important measures are delayed until the next industrial cycle, which in some industries is many years away. New regulatory frameworks will compress this timeframe - forcing companies to prove their resilience to the effects of climate change and adapt to major socio-economic transitions (eg. a ban on sales of new internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035).
The magnitude of the transformations to be accomplished is such that many organizations must entirely rethink their function. Designing and manufacturing a sustainable product can mean an end to incremental changes, instead requiring some businesses to reconsider their entire ecosystem.
For example, upheavals related to the use of new energy sources may require us to overhaul sectors (sometimes entirely) and reposition actors in new value chains. This also involves setting up dozens of new indicators, with reliable measurement, accountable to third parties.
Real-time compliance verification at each stage of a product or process’s life is necessary to ensure all suppliers are involved in this approach. More broadly, eco-responsibility must be a pillar of the company’s brand, in order to recruit and retain young engineers seeking meaningful work and wanting to be part of the solution.
The need to quickly explore new approaches (and the corresponding need for rapid simulation) means that only digital technologies can manage the complexity of change (human, financial, operational). They alone can mobilize data that is clean, organized, reliable, and sharable.
Mastering data is increasingly important, as this data becomes proof that must be authenticated to both customers and auditors. The value of data; its relevance, its storage in significant volumes, and its exploitation, will become a strategic challenge. And the integrity of this data will become an increasingly important contractual issue.
As mentioned, in this era of sustainability, notions of eco- responsibility, carbon impact, and resource consumption must translate into contextualized and relevant metrics - before becoming actions and behavioral evolutions at all levels within the organization. Taking a broader view is essential - not only to observe the data, but also the data’s interconnections. Thanks to Digital Continuity, this broader perspective is now achievable.
The major advantage of Digital Continuity is that it introduces objectivity to areas where it may have been lacking. For example, it can calculate the overall carbon cost of a product throughout the value chain, by seeking objective elements at all stages of its life.
Digital Continuity operates in the fields of virtualization, simulation, integration (of platforms, systems, software, and hardware) and connectivity - touching multiple points of highly sensitive information. It can thus only be delivered in a highly cyber secure environment.
When amplified by the power of digital twins, Digital Continuity has major potential for delivering sustainability goals. They will be able to enrich their simulation capabilities and aim for:
An integration of PLM + ERP + LCA to redefine design principles; decreasing inconsistency, revisiting process/design faults that cause losses and increasing overall efficiency
Reducing the risk of defects, thus extending product lifespans
Revising production cycles for less material waste and better resource use
Integrating environmental data from production as a product design factor, for example, simplifying design can reduce manufacturing time, and thus energy consumption
If stakeholders understand its power, and extend its scope, Digital Continuity can support industrial environmental goals. In closing, we reiterate that Digital Continuity is about global transformation. It’s a tool to support the entire industrial organization, a true companion to global industrial performance.
Author Thomas Bachellerie, Manufacturing & Process - Engineering Unit Director, Capgemini Engineeringw page
