Sharing some thoughts on the use of software tools for supporting sustainable product development.

In 2013, the top 20 corporate R&D spenders collectively spent over $159 billion (£92 billion) in R&D (Strategy&, Global Innovation 1000 study 2013). While they may all have a strong sustainability strategy in place, their sustainability aspirations have yet to be fully reflected through their products.

Design defines a product. There is no chicken-and-egg question: if sustainability considerations are not built into the innovation and design stages of product development process, we will not be able to make sustainable products.

However, integrating sustainability considerations into the product development process has always been a tough challenge, especially for established, complex international corporates. Behind every new product, there is always a battle to find the sweet spot between resource, cost, market demand, technology, corporate commitments, and so forth.

Given the scale and complexity of this challenge, it is very tempting to turn to the default solution of our generation: let’s get software! Indeed, a software solution could be an effective way to tackle such a challenge, but we need to get the right tool to do the right job.

But before we reach for a tool, we need to know what the job is that we need to perform. There are 5 key business requirements for integrating sustainability into the product development process:

1. Streamlining the process – improving the efficiency of sustainable product development;
2. Being part of the evolution – integrating with existing processes of monitoring and improving the current product portfolio;
3. Encouraging innovation – motivating employees to come up with new and better ways to do things;
4. Making business sense – modelling, quantifying and monitoring the commercial and sustainability benefits at a corporate level;
5. Sharing product vision and benefits – enabling effective communications to engage different stakeholders, from executives to frontline employees.

A competent sustainable product development software solution should address the five business requirements listed above to build product sustainability and performance improvements into the process of change, rather than a one-off improvement. The following characteristics can typically be found in good sustainable product development software:

Collaborative – Increasingly, companies acknowledge the power of collaboration in product development. Great ideas can come from anywhere and companies should set up a robust process to encourage collaboration and capture outcomes systematically. Good sustainable product development software should provide a platform for innovation and connect people from different disciplines with different backgrounds and expertise. The platforms should also allow the most radical companies to collaborate with external stakeholders and facilitate the assimilation of internal and external innovation efforts.

Efficient – You don’t need a full-blown LCA (Life Cycle Assessment, or as some may prefer to reference it, Lengthy Confusing Assessment) for every design concept. To streamline the sustainability assessment process, fit for purpose sustainable product development software should allow a “quick and easy” assessment that focuses on the metrics that are material to the sustainability performance of the product, allowing the R&D and design team to spend less time analysing, and more time designing and innovating.

Flexible – Every company’s product development process is unique and therefore the sustainable product development software should be flexible enough to develop bespoke solutions. And it should be flexible at a number of different levels: it should be able to accommodate different sustainability assessment approaches; it should allow tracking and comparison of different environmental and performance metrics; and enable customised decision making functionalities to be developed to match with the user’s business process and needs.

Integrated – “The sum of contributions are more than their individual parts”. The software should allow the data of an existing product portfolio to be integrated into the database. This should enable users to access, analyse and build on existing products to develop new product concepts and compare them with others. Additionally, the database should also accommodate commercial data, such as the volume of sales, to allow corporate level product sustainability impacts and improvement progress to be monitored.

Scalable – More collaborations mean faster data growth. Good sustainable product development software should have a robust and scalable data structure that allows the user to create, access and reuse data easily.

Engagement – To facilitate collaboration, the software should also support effective communications to audiences from various parts of business. Good social and sharing functionalities, simplified technical information and clear data visualisation are very helpful for stakeholder engagement.

…and implementation - We can discuss forever what makes good software. However, we must remember that ultimately software is merely a tool. How effective it is in assisting the transformation of your product development process depends on how well the tool is implemented. To make the most out of sustainable product development software, you have to understand and clearly define what your product development process is, who the stakeholders are, and what your sustainability priorities are. An implementation strategy should be developed on the basis of a practical understanding of the product development process.

Anthesis has achieved this with RB. We worked with RB to develop and implement a sustainable product development tool which is used by over 500 staff around the world and has completed more than 700 product analyses.

So, in conclusion, a software solution can be highly effective in facilitating the integration of the sustainability agenda within the product development process.  Good sustainable product development software should be business requirement-oriented and implemented in alignment with a company’s core product development process.