Siemens Technology Empowers Engineers to Create Sustainable Products

Prioritizing sustainability is crucial to the future of our planet. For Siemens Digital industries, a core element of that strategy is to empower people from within the company to think about sustainability as a part of their everyday work, whether they’re working in a procurement department or designing the next release of software.

Join our host, Greg Arnot on this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast, as we welcome Eryn Devola, the Head of Sustainability for Siemens Digital Industries to talk to us about the various sustainability initiatives underway.

In this episode, you will learn about why we as consumers should care about sustainability, collective intelligence and why the concept of customer zero is so important. 

What you’ll learn in this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast:

• The shifting trends in sustainability (04:36)
• What Siemens is doing to help their customers develop more sustainable products (08:28)
• How regulations affect Siemens customer sustainability, goals, and strategy (14:22)
• Siemens’ strategy to  ensure sustainability is a focus in academic engineering education (15:41)
• How the digital twin can help companies meet sustainability requirements (17:06)

You can always listen to the Next Generation Design podcast right here, or wherever you do podcasts.

Read the summary or watch the video version of this episode: Exploring Siemens Sustainability Strategy with Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability at Siemens Digital Industries

Listen to or read the next episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Bringing New Innovations to Market with Maestro Product Design Releasing Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Listen to or read the previous episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Driving Sustainability in Design: Insights from Nexpirit and Phoenix Contact

We know that 80% of the environmental impacts of a product are determined during the realization or design process. So, the more we can shift left our understanding of sustainability, the better we can minimize those environmental impacts.

Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability, Siemens Digital Industries

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Podcast transcript for Siemens Technology Empowers Engineers to Create Sustainable Products

Eryn Devola: We really need to build sustainability into every decision that we make. So, a core element of our strategy is empowering our people within our company to think about sustainability as a part of what they’re doing every day, whether they’re working in a procurement department or designing our next release of software. It’s about really understanding that every decision you make has an impact and then looking at how you can minimize those footprint impacts and maximize those handprint impacts—the positive impacts you can have.

Greg Arnot: You’re listening to another episode of the Next Generation Design podcast. I’m your host, Greg Arnot. On today’s episode, I’m joined by Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability for Siemens Digital Industries. Before we begin, let’s meet today’s guest. Welcome, Eryn. Can you tell our listeners a bit about your responsibilities as Head of Sustainability at Siemens? What, exactly, does the role entail?

Eryn Devola: I first look at the operations that we have and what’s happening within our own footprint, so thinking about the impacts that we’re having with the choices we make about how to travel, our office spaces, our factories, and also how we process through our data centers. I really look at the direct environmental impacts that we have from the activities that we directly engage in. The second lens I get to look through is that of the products that we produce, especially the hardware products, looking at those impacts that happen within our own footprint but also extending that focus to include what’s happening in our supply chain and in the use phase of those products. So, really taking a cradle-to-next-cradle view of those products and looking at what those impacts are across their entire life cycle. And then the third angle, or the third lens that I get to look through, is really how we can take solutions and bring them to our customers, to shift from a footprint view—which is what we really think about in those first two focuses, in our own operations and in our products—to what we like to think of as a handprint view, which is about how we can help others become more sustainable with the tools that we put onto the market for them. So, really looking at how we can help our industrial customers become more sustainable within their own operations. It gives me a very comprehensive view and helps us have great conversations about how we can play a big role in moving sustainability forward.

Greg Arnot: I love that concept of your handprint as well as your footprint, very interesting.  Looking a little more closely at your career path, you’ve had a very interesting trajectory. I see you have a background in mechanical engineering. I’m curious, how did you go from engineering to sustainability?

Eryn Devola: I’ve spent a lot of my career working in factories and around factories. I actually really love being in and around factories, so maybe it doesn’t seem so strange to be helping people who work in the industry become more sustainable. But I also think where we’re at right now is that the generation of sustainability professionals we have today didn’t study sustainability. They really came from another discipline. They bring that expertise, and they enhance it with additional knowledge around sustainability and impact. I think it’s important because I have always appreciated my engineering education and how that’s given me a great foundation for complex problem-solving and for really understanding multi-factored optimization. These things are really important to be a truly sustainable enterprise and to help others become sustainable as they move forward.

Greg Arnot: Why is sustainability particularly important to you? Why should our listeners care about it?

Eryn Devola: I think there are a number of reasons why people care about sustainability. The first is often that it’s a core value for them; they want to leave the planet a better place than it was when they arrived. But I think, from a more business perspective, when we look into the future, we know that we have limited resources on this earth, and we’re currently using 170% of those renewable resources every year. So we’re using 0.7 more Earth’s worth of resources than it generates. When you look into that future, you realize that being a viable business of the future requires two aspects: you still need to be a profitable enterprise, but you also need to be a sustainable enterprise. We really think that long-term viability depends on both profitability and sustainability. I think that’s why it’s so important, as we look forward to being able to help lay these layers of additional complexity in a way that makes it easy to make decisions that optimize for both of these dimensions.

Greg Arnot: What major trends are you seeing in this area?

Eryn Devola: I think the big trend is that we shifted from really just thinking about CO2, and we’ve been able to extend our focus a bit more to think about bigger topics like how efficiently we are using resources, how we are putting together models that value circularity or that value extended use and reuse of materials. You always have to start somewhere, so CO2, I think, was a very smart place to start. Our planet continues to get warmer, and we’re seeing the impacts of that. But sustainability doesn’t end at CO2. There are a lot of other impacts we have to look at, like biodiversity, land use, water, rare earth elements, and substances of concern. These are all additional elements that we put into an already complex optimization process.

Greg Arnot: From Siemens’ point of view, why is it so important to focus on increased sustainability?

Eryn Devola: I think because we’ve been around 177 years, and we’d like to be around 177 more. It’s really about being a viable business moving forward, about being a company that I’m personally proud to work for, making a positive impact on people and society, and applying our technology to help everyone become a little bit better, faster, more profitable, and always more sustainable.

Greg Arnot: And what is Siemens’ overall strategy to ensure that happens?

Eryn Devola: At a high level, we really need to build sustainability into every decision that we make. So, a core element of our strategy is empowering our people within our company to think about sustainability as a part of what they’re doing every day, whether they’re working in a procurement department or designing our next release of software. It’s about really understanding that every decision you make has an impact and then looking at how you can minimize those footprint impacts and maximize those handprint impacts—the positive impacts you can have. That’s a core part of it. We define it with our DEGREE program, which really just outlines the many ways that we’re trying to move in that direction.

Greg Arnot: Can you tell our audience a bit more about the DEGREE framework?

Eryn Devola: Within Siemens, when we think about sustainability, we try to put it in the frame of our DEGREE framework, which covers six big topics for us. The first is decarbonization, where we talk a lot about CO2 footprints and what we can do for ourselves and our customers to reduce those. The first E stands for ethics, and this is where we really want to foster a culture of trust and be a credible business partner and enterprise for our investors and stakeholders. The G in DEGREE stands for governance, showing that we’ve got the right structures to drive through credible, responsible business conduct in the places where we’re doing business and with the people we’re doing business with along the way. The R in DEGREE is for resource efficiency and circularity, talking about how we plan to optimize or minimize resource usage and drive for longer life cycles and second and third life cycles for products as we move forward. The next E is for equity, ensuring that we have a fair and diverse environment for our employees and the people we do business with and the communities we do business in. The last E is employability, focusing on the right skills for life that we can give to our employees and foster in the communities where we participate and drive our impact. What we’re trying to do there is show to the world what we stand for and how we want to operate as a company moving forward.

Greg Arnot: Thanks so much for that, Eryn. You can quiz me at the end to see if I remember all that. Can you help us understand what has Siemens been doing at the Digital Industries level to help customers be more sustainable and develop more sustainable products?

Eryn Devola: One of the key ways we think we can best enable sustainability is by adding these impact analysis tools to our suite. We want to give as many people as possible access to tools that can help them make better, more inclusive sustainability decisions along the way. We really see that as a big part of our role. Another thing that we do, which we haven’t talked much about yet today, is how we can help foster startups. We see so many new, brilliant ideas coming around sustainability. With our Siemens Xcelerator marketplace and our as-a-service-based models, we’re able to get small companies that are just starting up access to state-of-the-art tools that may have been limited to much larger companies in the past.

Greg Arnot: Are there any specific examples of this work that you can share with our listeners?

Eryn Devola: There’s a company called Regent trying to make coastal gliders that will, with zero footprints, move people over water between key cities in the US. We are working with so many companies in the food and beverage space, trying to do controlled environment agriculture and optimizing and having zero waste across those value chains. One great example is a company called Ekonoke, where they’re doing vertical or controlled environment agriculture for hops. What they have been able to do is put that hop factory right next to a brewery with AB InBev. Using digital tools, they can connect and see a life cycle analysis. They can also, with that technology, be able to grow hops at scale in a controlled environment and provide a very reliable supply chain to AB InBev. They do that because they can scale with the tools we provide at Siemens.

Greg Arnot: Such an excellent idea to site an indoor hop farm right beside a global brewer. We’re hearing  the term “collective intelligence” being used – could you tell us what that means  in the context of sustainability?

Eryn Devola: I love to think about collective intelligence as the way we bring together knowledge that might be within a manufacturer, within their supply chain, and within their distribution network to get a complete picture of the impacts of any given single product or process. We like to think that bringing all that information together gives you a much more complete picture and allows you to optimize across the whole value chain instead of just optimizing at one spot or another. An example I like to talk about sometimes. It may not be surprising, I listen to a lot of podcasts, but one of the ones I listen to is Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell. He did an episode where he talked about Procter & Gamble designing a more sustainable detergent for laundry. Instead of just looking at the detergents they make, they looked at the entire environmental impact of a load of laundry. What they learned is that the most energy was used in heating the water for the laundry cycle. So, instead of optimizing their detergent to remove a substance or use a little bit less, they optimized it to work in cold water. This is what having collective intelligence of looking across the whole value chain can do for you. It can help you optimize for the thing that has the biggest impact, even if that impact isn’t within your gate-to-gate. 

Greg Arnot: Lately, the concept of “customer zero” has gained quite a bit of traction, meaning that an organization is both the first and the leading customer of its own products and services. Tell me, Eryn, is Siemens customer zero for sustainability?

Eryn Devola: I think in some places we are, and in other places, we can learn from those that have come before us. For example, when we look at our design tools, we’re really adding functionality that is first in class and best in class to help people make decisions based on sustainability. But I also look at commitments that some of our technology partners are making, and I think that we have a lot we can continue to learn and grow with. No one enterprise is going to save this world; we’re going to have to do it with partners, learning from each other and collaborating—maybe radically—in really different ways than we have in the past. I was on a panel recently around the chemical industry, and one of the people on the panel, one of the chemical customers, said, “This talk we had today, this information I shared, I wouldn’t have been allowed to share five years ago,” and just really understanding and driving that collaboration because you can’t solve it yourself and because you have to think about it from the end of a value chain as the start of the next value chain.

Greg Arnot: What collaboration networks does Siemens participate in to aid transparency along the supply chain?

Eryn Devola: I’ll just bring up two quick examples. The first is the Catena-X organization, which is for the automotive industry. This organization isn’t specifically founded around sustainability, but they really drive consistent standards of how they want to measure CO2, for example, and how they want to move forward as OEMs in their space, but also with their supply chains. So, they’re an example in the automotive industry. And then, if we think about the process industry, in the chemical industry, they’ve got an organization called Together for Sustainability, or T4S, and they’re grappling with some of those same questions for their industry. How do we get a common exchange of data so we can get more transparency? How do we speak the same language, and how do we use the same units when we try and add and pull data together? Because data is really the backbone of making some of these complex decisions. Those are just two great examples of industry organizations that are out there. I’ll also say that at Siemens, we’re a member of the Green Software Foundation, which is trying to solve some of these same problems for software that we’ve already maybe made more progress on for hardware.

Greg Arnot: And how do regulations affect Siemens’ customers’ sustainability goals and strategy?

Eryn Devola: Regulation plays an important role because it helps us where maybe profitability isn’t clear yet; it gives you a path to make progress where you have to iterate to drive the cost out of that same change. So, when we look at where change happens and how governments really approach it, we’ve got two big approaches. We’ve got what we like to think of as carrots and sticks. We’ve got incentives that come to get us to invest in technologies or in industries that are growing, which are supported by the government. Maybe one great example of that is the IRA, or Inflation Reduction Act, in the US. And then we also have legislation in the EU, for example, that really tries to drive transparency and improvement through transparency with things like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD, which is based on the EU taxonomy and the ESRS. So, you really see this maturation of governmental understanding and direction of what it means to be a sustainable business. And then, if I go back to what I said at the beginning, that sustainable business definition, I believe, really becomes part of your long-term business viability just as much as your financial performance does. So, I think the role is very key, and it helps show you what it takes to be a future-proof enterprise.

Greg Arnot: Can you break down for our listeners what Siemens is doing to ensure sustainability is a focus in academic engineering education? What collaborations are currently happening?

Eryn Devola: In the academic arena, one of the activities that we’re most proud of is the work we’ve done with the University of Colorado, Boulder in putting together a circular economy-based curriculum that’s available on Coursera. They’re also working on getting that to be an accredited certificate program. We’ve taken experts around Siemens and professors from the university to develop a clear curriculum that gives people the opportunity to expand their knowledge around sustainability in general but maybe, more specifically, around circularity. We think that’s one way we can really increase our reach on circularity and get people thinking more about their impacts.

Greg Arnot: Switching gears just slightly, I’d like to talk more specifically about the importance of sustainability in product development. 

Eryn Devola: 80% of the environmental impacts of a product are determined during the realization or design process. So, the more we can shift left our understanding of sustainability, the better we can minimize those environmental impacts. To me, product design is key. It’s at the heart and is the first, most important step. That’s where I get excited, because I think we can play a big role here.

Greg Arnot: What about engineers? Do you think they should focus on creating more sustainable products during the design process?

Eryn Devola: I think they have to be. If they want to have a future-proof product, it has to be able to meet all of the requirements. Some of those requirements may be more traditional, around performance or cost, but they’re going to have—if they don’t already—targets around their CO2 footprint, water usage, biodiversity impacts, etc. Those targets are coming because that’s part of some of the legislation and required disclosures.

Greg Arnot: How have you seen digital twins help companies in this process? 

Eryn Devola: When you have a really comprehensive digital twin, it gives you two things that I think are really important. One is it allows you to optimize without using any physical resources, so you can take testing and really do most of it in a virtual world. 

Greg Arnot: Can you elaborate a bit more on that?

Eryn Devola: I used to work for a refrigeration manufacturer, and before we would bring a refrigeration line to market, we would test 100 refrigerators that we would build, and then swing the door open and closed over 100,000 times. Now, I can do a lot of that testing, get those insights, and only have to produce in the real world a fraction of the number of units I had to produce in the past. That’s one really important element: A comprehensive digital twin gives you the ability to run through that testing both faster and bringing this to market more quickly but also with lower environmental impacts. The second piece of it is, I think, it gives us the freedom to be more creative in the design process because it doesn’t cost so much or take so long to try a whole lot of different iterations. In the past, maybe you were limited by the time you had to do testing, or you were limited by the space within the lab you had to use. In the virtual world, I can test significantly more iterations and be a little bit more creative about what we try. I actually find the idea that I can optimize and take something that doesn’t feel intuitive and give it a go, and maybe that actually is the most effective solution. I think that’s another important aspect of the digital twin.

Greg Arnot: And how does sustainable product development affect supply chains? What do designers and engineers need to consider when they’re designing sustainable products?

Eryn Devola: For most products, Scope 3 upstream or supply chain is the biggest contribution to their CO2 footprint. It’s extremely important to understand these impacts and work to minimize them as you think about the end-to-end value chain for the products you’re producing. It’s clear that there’s a need and that that’s where the impacts are. What’s been less clear right now is how to get that data, how to have consistent ways to communicate and share data, and ensure our data is in the same unit and calculated the same way. Standardization becomes important, and the trust to be transparent is also really important as we look at the supply chain. Making sure that you and your partners are collaborating in different and more fundamental ways than in the past is clearly needed to drive sustainability in that cradle-to-next-cradle view.

Greg Arnot: I suppose in some way, there has to be something in it for the supply chain. They have to be able to see some benefit out of it if they’re going to be driven to do anything.

Eryn Devola: For us at Siemens, most of our significant suppliers have their own targets that they’re working toward as well. Part of being sustainable is having partners who share similar goals, objectives, and values. At Siemens, we have many partners that have those similar values, and it’s about trying to find out how we make the right choices and investments to achieve the biggest reductions. That’s where transparency becomes important. I would say within our supply chains, our partners often have the same sustainability goals and values. We just need to figure out how to get that transparent view so we can work together toward those goals.

Greg Arnot: As someone with a mechanical background, what are the features that you would look for in CAD software to help you develop more sustainable products?

Eryn Devola: When I’m trying to make design choices about whole locations or shapes, being able to see the impacts on how much material I’m using, or when I’m selecting materials, being able to see what the impacts of different material choices are outside of mechanical properties is also important. Clearly, you’d pick something that meets your mechanical property requirements. In the past, you may have then looked at cost or appearance. What I think you also need to look at is what’s the CO2 footprint, for example, of that particular material. Is there a similar material in cost and performance that has a much lower footprint? These are the additional elements of complexity we’ve added to this job. Being a design engineer is not getting easier, that’s for certain. But I think our tools are also getting better at the same time. So, we’re adding layers of complexity but also giving additional insights to help make those tough decisions.

Greg Arnot: Recently, the NX Sustainability Impact Analysis module was introduced. Are you able to tell  us about that module? How does it work and what are the benefits of leveraging it in a design process?

Eryn Devola: What that piece of software does is it allows you to look at those impacts like I just talked about when selecting a material. It also allows you to take a target—a CO2 target, a biodiversity target—and put that into your overall requirements for your design. As I marry and join components together, as I create sub-assemblies, I can see how I’m rolling up to that target. I can also see, as I look at a part or an assembly, where the bigger impact parts are from 14 different environmental lenses. This is functionality you had, maybe, when you looked at cost in the past. It’s functionality you had when you looked at material characteristics. Now, we have that same functionality that can show you what’s going on with the environmental impacts. It’s really an important insight to get early in the design process.

Greg Arnot: I can see how that would be tremendously helpful in the process. Now, Eryn, before this interview began, we used a leading search engine to find some of the most commonly asked questions about product design and sustainability. As a bit of fun, I’d love to get your opinion on these questions. Number one: How does CAD software support sustainable design practices?

Eryn Devola: The first thing that CAD software does to support sustainable design practices is it gives you the ability to see the impacts during the process. That’s really the important thing. If I have to wait until I’ve already designed the product and bought machinery to produce it to understand what the impacts are, it’s too late or too expensive to go back and attempt to minimize those. So, it really helps us shift left in a fundamental way.

Greg Arnot: And what, exactly, does that mean? To “shift left”?

Eryn Devola: Moving it earlier in the process. Instead of taking a product that we’ve already produced, looking at what the impacts are, and saying, “Oh, if I change out this one thing, then I can do this, but then maybe I have to also change machinery, manufacturing processes, or my building.” If I make that decision early—or as I would always say, shift left along your timeline—I can make that decision about the material before I’ve bought machinery, installed anything in a factory, or have an installed base in the market.

Greg Arnot: Our second question is something I’ve been learning about myself—particularly the idea that a tremendous amount of our production is not circular. What is the circular economy and the circular design method? Can you explain how sustainable product design fits into that?

Eryn Devola: So, when we talk about the circular economy, what we really mean is thinking about materials and business models in a way that extends life cycles and creates a circle rather than a linear approach. So, if you think about what happens in traditional manufacturing is you’ll take materials from the earth, you’ll make them into a product, and you’ll dispose of it at the end of its life. We call that a linear design cycle. A circular cycle says, “I’m going to take something from the earth, I’m going to use it as long as humanly possible, and then I’m going to either repurpose it, repair it, retrofit it, or do something with it at the end to give that product a second life cycle, or recycling it into something that can be used for another purpose or product.” It really thinks about the idea of going from a line where I dispose of something to a circle where we have reuse for all the things I’ve already taken from the earth. Then, theoretically, our future state is that I don’t have to take anything else from the earth; I can just continually reuse what we’ve already extracted. So, that’s the fundamental piece of a circular economy. To talk about the design methods that support that, it really is thinking about what the next life is going to be while I’m designing this life. What does that new space look like? What does its end-of-life look like? Am I designing it to be retrofitted? Am I selecting materials that are easier to process and reuse? These are some considerations that need to come into the design process. 

Greg Arnot: Eryn, before we go, I’d like to look a bit toward the future. When it comes to new talent, what skills do you think we should be looking for in new hires to help us meet our sustainability goals?

Eryn Devola: We’ve actually been doing a lot of talking about this within our own people and organization here at Siemens. For me, it comes down to a few things. One is having an interest and ability to constantly learn because what we know about sustainability is growing and changing. I said to my boss the other day, this job has more reading in it than I ever thought it would because there’s always something new to learn. So, having a clear commitment to a growth mindset and being a lifelong learner is really important if you want to be around sustainability. I think it’s a lot about managing complexity and a little bit of ambiguity because you don’t know all the answers yet. We know that that might come into more focus in the next five or ten years, but we need to be directionally we’re going in the right way and being a little bit comfortable with not knowing everything perfectly or having all the data before making a decision and moving forward. These are two skills that I think are really important. They’re not necessarily hard skills as much as they are soft skills—having the ability to grow, adapt, and manage complexity are the big pieces there.

Greg Arnot: Apart from the raw ability to learn there’s also the appetite to keep going. In terms of regulations now and in the future, what do you think will change going forward? What’s in the pipeline?

Eryn Devola: I would expect regulation to have less ambiguity moving forward. When you’re defining regulation for something that no one has ever measured before, it’s really hard to get clear about what it is we want to do. So, I actually think clarity will come to this, standardization will come to regulation, and it will allow us to all be working off the same rulebook and the same set of parameters for our reporting. We see that with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD, coming from the EU taxonomy. It’s broad and a little bit unclear, and we’re working with NGOs, other companies, and government agencies to get clarity in that. I think that comes as we all grow in our understanding of what it is the governments want to achieve and what’s the right language. Getting them to understand the technology that we have within our portfolios is also key. So, there’s a lot of joint learning and growing going on that I think will become clearer as we move forward. I would also expect places that don’t have a lot of legislation to start growing in that area as their geographies become more impacted by some of the negative impacts of climate change and our overconsumption of resources.

Greg Arnot: Now I’m curious, what is your vision for the future? What role do you think Siemens will play in helping us get there?

Eryn Devola: My vision for the future is that every person weighs sustainability as part of their decision-making—whether when they purchase something, when they design something, or when they make a choice about how and where they want to travel. Really building sustainability into every decision you make would be my ideal future state. I think Siemens plays a big role in visualizing those impacts and helping people in the industrial sector understand not just the performance and the cost but also the sustainability impacts of the decisions they’re making.

Greg Arnot: Well, Eryn, we really appreciate your joining us today. It’s been wonderful speaking with you and learning a bit more about the various sustainability initiatives underway at Siemens and what the future might look like in that respect. Thank you so much again to Eryn, we hope to speak with you again soon. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in to today’s episode. Join us next time for more discussions about the latest in design innovation and software applications. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if you’re enjoying the content, please leave us a review. I’m your host, Greg Arnot, and this has been Next Generation Design.