Advanced Manufacturing 2022: Boosting sustainability with digital transformation

The building blocks of digital transformation (DX) are now proven, said Paul Haimes from PTC, during his Advanced Manufacturing session on how to leverage technologies with purpose – the tricky thing is knowing which ones to use, and how to use them.

Successful implementation relies on some key steps, he said, including first identifying challenges and clarifying potential improvements, before calculating the financial impact and prioritising solutions that will provide the desired outcome. All DX programmes need to be refined and proven with defined metrics, before they can be scaled across an organisation.

The benefits can be wide ranging, he said – from product quality to design time reduction – but perhaps one of the less obvious upsides is a boost to sustainability. Speaking as the UK baked in temperatures of 40ºC+, he said: “Here in the UK we’re feeling the effects of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, so sustainability is a huge topic and a huge challenge that industry faces.

“With digital transformation, there are so many of the use cases that we work on today that can and do have an impact on a sustainability goal, or perhaps a zero-waste goal that a company might have.”

There are “all sorts of things” companies can do using digital technologies to improve sustainability throughout a product lifecycle, he said – from using more simulation and exploring alternative materials during design, through to recycling and remanufacturing based on embedded material information at the end.

Read more: 4 key messages from Advanced Manufacturing 2022

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