MR: My name is Mark Reisig, and I’m an executive consultant with CIMdata, and I head up their green energy practice. So CIMdata’s a PLM consulting firm, helping industrial companies and solution providers as well with any aspect of the product life cycle.
LA: So when you do consulting, I imagine you kind of dive deep into a single company’s challenge that they’re facing regarding their environmental impact. What is the biggest surprise that you encounter, what is it that executives think they know, but really they don’t know about green manufacturing?
MR: I don’t know why I’m surprised by this, but they really don’t know what the carbon footprint of their products are. They produce ESG reports, so in theory…
LA: In theory they know, but they don’t really have a baseline of their greenhouse gas emissions, their use of renewable energy, their metrics on zero waste, etc.
MR: Correct.
LA: So how do you start to get them to a baseline on their carbon emissions, their energy consumption, and their sustainable manufacturing initiatives?
aPriori Provides Early Design and Carbon Guidance
MR: aPriori is certainly helping people do this by adding sustainability and carbon insights along with cost that allows designers to make the correct manufacturing process decisions early, aPriori’s software solutions can help them to determine 80% of all the carbon that will go into their products. Designers are now able to make those decisions in real-time. And the more software applications they have that can do that, the more they can collaborate and involve people across the product lifecycle: whether it’s sourcing, manufacturing, operations, the better off they’re going to be. aPriori has done a great job of describing what’s in the products, their future road map. What’s interesting to me is actually talking to a lot of the customers and what their challenges are across industries.
LA: And if you have a prediction… Even before that, what do you predict is going to be the biggest challenge for manufacturers across these industries?
How the Supply Chain Affects Your Carbon Footprint
MR: The biggest challenge? It’s probably going to continue to be the supply chain and diving deeper into the carbon footprint of a lot of their products. Probably 90% of the product is in the supply chain. So as they switch to new suppliers, the ability to automate processes such as procurement and lean manufacturing methodologies, and then streamline them, it is going to make a huge difference in their environmental sustainability efforts.
LA: You mean, 90% of the product is really out of their hands?
MR: Correct.
LA: It’s not being made in-house, it’s elsewhere in the supply chain.
MR: Absolutely.
LA: Getting a handle on that is really gonna be the clincher for the next year.
MR: Yes.
LA: Alright, we’re looking forward to seeing it. Thank you so much for talking to us this morning.
MR: And thank you.
