Most big companies have sustainability initiatives in place and have created high-level posts with sustainability-minded executives. Sustainability entered the design and engineering software world as early as 3DEXPERIENCE 2014 in Las Vegas when the high-minded Bernard Charlès, CEO of Dassault Systèmes, espoused “harmony between product, nature and life.” Since, then Siemens has offered us the digital twin as a sustainability savior. Autodesk reported on the State of Design Make and devotes a large part of its 55-page report to sustainability. But of the Big Four CAD companies, it may be PTC that is best positioned to address sustainability, having the tools and technology to assess the environmental impact of a product over the course of its whole life—from cradle to grave. The cradle being a product’s design, through its manufacture, its use and its end of life, the grave (recycling or reuse).
PTC has seized on the service life management world, which is all about a product’s usage, maintenance and service. The company has acquired its way into the service life management (SLM) market. It bought Servigistics in 2012 when CAD users did not know how to spell SLM. In 2022, PTC was to make its biggest acquisition ever, buying ServiceMax for $1.5 billion, maxing out its credit in the process.
If your conscience alone has not tried to be more sustainable, Jim Heppelmann, CEO of PTC, offered another reason at LiveWorx 2023, which recently concluded in Boston’s Seaport District: money.
“In many cases, the product can generate 10 times more revenue over its life than it did through the initial product sale,” said Heppelmann.
A jet engine may cost quite a bit to purchase, but over the course of the engine’s life, an airline spends far more on it with fuel and maintenance. The environmental cost comparison between making the engine and using it is even more lopsided. Imagine what a Boeing 747 engine’s exhaust did to the environment in its 27 years of service.
Sustainability Runs on Duncan
With service life software in its portfolio, PTC is in a prime position to develop an accounting system that can add up the total environmental impact of a product through all stages of its life cycle.
None better than a CAD company to start the environmental accounting process. Eighty percent of a product’s footprint is determined by the design, says Dave Duncan, PTC VP in charge of sustainability, who makes himself available at LiveWorx to answer questions about PTC’s quest for a more sustainable future.
If you have preconceived notions about what a sustainability officer should look like, Dave Duncan has only to stride into the room to shatter them all. The 6-and-half-foot-tall (he plays basketball and rugby) ex-military officer (U.S. Army; served in Serbia) comes to sustainability from a security perspective. History is full of militaries having to protect trade routes and supply chains….
I know where Duncan is heading.
“You mean like the wars fought over oil, we’re going to be fighting for minerals?” I ask.
He nods. We see eye to eye. Figuratively speaking. I’m at least a foot shorter than Duncan.
The minerals in question, nickel and lithium in particular, are mined (mining itself is one of the most polluting industries we have) and in foreign countries, most of them poor except for their mineral wealth. Is this not OPEC and Gulf Wars all over again?
Duncan approached PTC’s EVP Catherine Kniker with an offer.
“What can I do to help?” he asked. Kniker had been looking for sustainability credentials and experience but was quick to realize that it would be easier to teach a product guy and engineer (BSCE, Princeton) sustainability than to teach a sustainability guy about PTC’s business.
Duncan lost no time in learning. He is enrolled in a Sustainability certificate program at MIT. And he walks the talk. He has an electric car (a Tesla) and has installed solar panels on his house.
Preaching to Industry
“About 25 percent of my job is to make ourselves more sustainability,” says Duncan. “The rest is trying to make our customers more sustainable. Our customers can have much more of an impact on the environment than we do.”
It’s only too easy for a software company to go green and preach sustainability and is perhaps too difficult to be taken seriously. Duncan recognizes the challenge. Why should our companies, some of the biggest manufacturers in the world, listen to us?
Still, PTC is devoted to providing an example. Its gleaming office tower in Boston’s Seaport District was one of only a handful of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum buildings in Boston when PTC moved into it. The company holds the conference down the street from its headquarters, meaning most of the PTC employees in attendance did not have to fly to get there. Duncan is aware that most of the attendees have to fly in.
We may have to buy carbon credits to offset that, says Duncan.
The footprint, by PTC’s definition, correlates with carbon footprint, the embodied carbon of the material and the components that go into it as well as the nonrenewable energy that’s emitted through the supply chain in the factory for production as well as its service and end use.
Determining the exact size of a product’s total environmental footprint is far from trivial addition. Few environmental cost calculators have been developed for each stage of a product’s life cycle.
As of now, there is no product or product suite that allows for a holistic analysis of a product’s environmental footprint. Duncan thinks it would be a good idea to have one and agrees that PTC is best positioned to create it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if products, like Creo or Windchill, were able to provide the carbon footprint of a part as it is being designed, like a little window that estimates what the carbon cost is as you are designing it, similar to computer and car companies that let you see the total cost as you are choose configurations and options. A product designer could see the impact of one material versus another, for example. The part would have a rough estimated environmental cost when it leaves the designer’s hands as only its shape, volume and material have been determined. But as the part is manufactured, the manufacturing programs add precision by supplying the cost associated with how it is made—whether in sheet metal, CNC, molded, cast, 3D printed, and so on. When the part is procured, the supply chain application could add the shipping cost. And finally, service lifecycle management (SLM) software fills in the environmental cost over the service life of the part.
Of course, this vision requires a continuous digital thread, an environmental monitor that keeps up with the part as it progresses through its life and a database that is accessible to all the various applications used at every stage of the product’s life cycle.
Advantage: PTC and ServiceMax
The advantage of ServiceMax is that it is asset centric, instead of being field centric, says Duncan. Assets are tracked by their serial numbers, which can be scanned easily enough with a barcode scanner. The serial number is the “Rosetta stone” connecting the design data and the operational data.
“Operational data is keyed on serial number, but it normally won’t understand configuration specifications. On the engineering side, the PLM systems don’t understand serial numbers. It needs the central record that understands both sides. Then an engineer that is improving a design can understand how it actually performed in the factory, in the field. With ServiceMax, you finally have that cross-reference.”
PTC may be taking steps to realize this sort of environmental impact monitor, covering both the nose (design) and the tail of a product’s life. The company’s growing partnership with Ansys will help to determine costs at the design stage. PTC now has access to the Granta material database, which can let engineers know how their choice of material is contributing to a product’s carbon footprint.
But a true accounting of carbon and environmental impact ought to start with the material selection. Where it is mined should be factored in. Material mined and processed domestically doesn’t incur as much shipping cost as one mined in a distant place. There is no highly polluting maritime fuel oil burned. A true accounting should extend into the product afterlife, as it were, or how the product is disposed of, recycled or, best of all, reused.
A holistic accounting of environmental costs may benefit the customer most of all. Duncan gives an example of a customer that minimized copper wire diameter to save material and manufacturing costs but increased the resistance over the life of the part, increasing the cost of energy by a thousandfold.