This post shares our second interview this year in the PLM Global Green Alliance series, where we talked with PLM-related software vendors and their activities related to Sustainability. Last year, we spoke mainly with the more traditional PLM vendors, but this year, we started with Makersite, a company specialized in Product Lifecycle Intelligence supporting sustainability analysis.

And now we are happy to talk this time with Mark Rushton,  Senior Product Marketing Manager and Ryan Flavelle, Associate Product Owner, both at aPriori Technologies. For my PGGA partner Mark Reisig and me, it was an interesting discussion in a domain where the focus was not on product design at the time.

 

aPriori

aPriori, according to their website, focuses on Digital Manufacturing, digitizing the entire manufacturing process, from design to production, and therefore able to asses environmental impact in a reliable manner.

It was an informative dialogue. Watch the 35-minute discussion here and learn how aPriori uniquely digitizes the manufacturing processes to support Sustainability.

Slides shown during the interview combined with additional company information can be found HERE.

 

What we have learned

  • aPriori’s customers have pushed the company to provide faster and digital sustainability insights in their manufacturing processes, illustrating that companies are really acting to understand their environmental impact. To measure is to know.
  • In this interview, we saw the concepts of the digital twin of manufacturing processes and the digital twin of a plant.
  • aPriori uniquely starts their impact analysis based on the 3d CAD geometry, being more accurate than what most LCA tools do, a BOM-based assessment,

Want to learn more?

Here are some links to the topics discussed in our meeting:

 

Conclusions

When it comes to sustainability in action, you need to be able measure and understand your environmental impact. Where traditional PLM activities focus on the design phase, there is also a lot to learn during the manufacturing phase. aPriori is doing this on a unique manner, not just based on BOM-analysis. In addition companies like aPriori have already a longer term experience with the virtual twin for manufacturing, originally used for cost and manufacturability analysis. Now extended to sustainability and their customers are working on it.

Next week more about the 3DEXPERIENCE conference – did I see you there?