Sustainability Software Makes Measurable Reduction in Carbon Emissions
LA: Gibson, Peters, you’re in charge of the first software to give sustainability insights along with cost. Tell me how the software works for decarbonization. If I’m a design engineer and I’m looking at a new part in my CAD system that I’m using to solve a design problem, how am I going to see both the cost centers in that product and then the carbon emissions of that product?
GP: Well, I think one of the things that sets us apart too is you’ll be able to see the cost and the carbon emissions right next to each other. So you do everything you would do normally to cost a part, you analyze that part, you hit the button, and then you’ll be able to switch on a new tab, and see the sustainability or carbon emissions associated with that part. And I think the disruption of this technology is that it really allows you to iterate quickly to find an optimum solution between cost and carbon emissions, instead of finding the cost, getting to a good design, and then shipping it off to someone from another department to do a life cycle assessment. You wait for them to do their analysis and ship it back. Maybe it takes a few weeks. When you use this software for sustainability, you can hit your ESG goals with less disruption up and down the value chain.
LA: So there are a lot of sustainability calculators that a company might use for ESG reporting. There are not a lot of them that are doing multi-variant analysis, like aPriori is. And there are not a lot of them that are looking at all the different ways carbon footprint can be generated. So tell me about something that you might not see in other carbon calculators, like, for example, waste material.
GP: So one of the big things we’re finding is the percentage of waste is a big driver for climate change. If you think of a finished part that’s machined, you might end up with 30 percent of that original stock material ends up in the final product. But to date, we were only able to say, “Well, this is what the finished product looks like. This is one kilogram of product, it’s one kilogram of steel.” But now we’re saying, “Well, that’s what you ended up with, but you started at three kilograms of steel.” So really, if you don’t understand the manufacturing process and the rough material you need to start, you don’t understand the full CO2 impact of that product.
ESG Goals Get Closer with Sustainability Insights
LA: What are you most excited about customers seeing when they start to adopt the aPriori solution for sustainability?
GP: I think what is exciting for me and the feedback we hear is almost a sense of relief that their climate action initiatives are possible now that they really have some metrics they can understand. We can give you an exact number for how much energy this one machine uses, and then you can switch that machine, or you can switch to renewables, or you can tweak the design a little bit and then switch to a smaller machine that uses less energy. Or sourcing can look at your supply chains and think about nearshoring or reshoring — switching to closer supplier partnerships that might help you better meet your corporate sustainability goals. Until you had this level of data and access to data, you were stuck making some generalizations that may be right, may be wrong. But you just didn’t know until you were able to dig down into the details. That’s what these sustainability insights give you.