Driving Sustainability in Design: Insights from Nexpirit and Phoenix Contact

How can sustainability become an enabler rather than a burden? What role does digital transformation, lifecycle management, and environmental data play in modern product design?

On this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast, our host Greg Arnot speaks with Lucas Dann, Mechanical Engineer & Managing Director at Nexpirit, and Lennart Gorholt, Senior Project Manager at Phoenix Contact Group. Together, they explore how sustainability can be seamlessly integrated into the design process, how companies can leverage Siemens’ NX and Teamcenter to track and optimize environmental footprints and why waiting for “perfect data” is no longer an excuse to delay action.

Lucas and Lennart share insights into how digital tools empower engineers to measure sustainability impacts early in product design, how Phoenix Contact developed an automated system for CO₂ footprint calculations and the real-world impact of shifting sustainability efforts “left” in the design cycle.

Whether you’re an engineer, product designer or business leader, this episode will change how you think about sustainability in the context of digital design and lifecycle management.

The current NX Design for Sustainability module in NX CAD is referred to as “NX Sustainability Impact Analysis” throughout the podcast.

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

• What Nexpirit does and how it integrates sustainability into PLM (07:00)
• How Phoenix Contact balances sustainability, cost, and technical requirements (11:25)
• How to integrate product design with sustainability (14:00) 
• The value of NX Sustainability Impact Analysis for product design (15:15)
• How Nexpirit was involved in the development of the NX Sustainability Impact Analysis product  (21:05)
• How does Phoenix Contact handle the calculation of environmental product declarations? (26:10)
• Future Technologies in sustainable development (30:55)
• How Phoenix Contact empowers employees to make sustainability a daily priority (37:25)
• Practical steps for startups and small businesses to integrate sustainability into product design (41:55)

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: Designing for sustainability with CAD and PLM | Phoenix Contact partners with Nexpirit for sustainable product design

Listen to or read the next episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: : From 2D to 3D: A Model Based Definition Design Process at MTU Aero Engines Releasing Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Listen to or read the previous episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Digitalizing the Construction Industry with Building Information Modeling (BIM)

It’s no longer about learning how to do the calculations; it’s more about really having the time, having the possibility to focus, creating change, and creating impact.

Lennart Gorholt, Senior Project Manager, Phoenix Contact Group

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Podcast transcript for Driving Sustainability in Design: Insights from Nexpirit and Phoenix Contact

Lucas Dann: You shouldn’t see sustainability as a burden. I think it’s a door opener to new markets and it also can differentiate you from your competition. In more and more industries like the big automotive OEMs or in the building industries, you need to have a CO2 value and other KPIs to even be able to sell your products. So you need to start. Get your BOM structures in place, get your material information in place, and then start doing the first calculations and start optimizing. Data is never final. It’s a process that has to get into the DNA of the company. It’s immediately also a door opener for other markets.

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 Lucas Dunn, Mechanical Engineer in Manufacturing and Management at Nexpirit, a company specializing in digital transformation and product lifecycle management offering a range of services aimed at helping companies manage their materials, ensure sustainability, and comply with substance regulations, as well as Lennart Gorholt, Master Project Manager at Phoenix Contact Group, a global leader in the field of electrical engineering and automation. 

Phoenix Contact’s products are used in many industrial fields including electric mobility, mechanical engineering, wind energy, solar energy, building automation, cyber security, and automotive.  

Before we begin, let’s say hello to our guests. Gentlemen, it’s great to have you here. Lucas, I’ll start with you if you don’t mind. Would you like to introduce yourself and your company to our listeners?

Lucas Dann: Thanks a lot, Greg. I’m Lucas Dann, I have been around in the PLM space for 14-15 years. I was always close to the domains of material management, substance compliance, and sustainability, and was a long-time product manager for those solutions also. For six years, we started the company Nexpirit. Nexpirit now has about 25 to 30 employees also, and we focus on the same domains as I mentioned earlier. So we build software solutions always very close to the Siemens portfolio for customers around the globe to help them reduce their CO2 footprints, and to find materials and substances that do not apply to global legislations. So phasing out restricted substances or helping them to set up a central database to manage materials and material knowledge.

Greg Arnot: Thank you, Lucas. Lennart, if I can ask you now, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Phoenix Contact?

Lennart Gorholt: Thanks for being here. My name is Lennart Gorholt. I’m the Senior Director at Phoenix Contact, located in Blomberg, our headquarters. My responsibility is for Phoenix to engage all of our subsidiaries worldwide on the topic of sustainability, to coordinate activities, and to make sure that we actually reach our goals. Phoenix Contact is a large company worldwide located with about 60 subsidiaries. So everywhere in the world, most likely we have a subsidiary to be close to our customers. We are active in the fields of electrification, networking, and automation, following our purpose to make some contribution to a sustainable world. So our main purpose is that one, using technology as a future concept. And today I’m happy to be here and give some insights about how we’re dealing and what the future might look like.

Greg Arnot: Could you tell me a bit about your role and your history at Phoenix?

Lennart Gorholt: Yeah, I started here at Phoenix in 2018 and since 2020 I’ve been one of the responsible persons to basically define the activities we need to do for sustainability. So starting really about what is sustainability for us? How do we interpret sustainability? What are the targets we’re having? So really target setting and also making sure that we can actually measure relevant KPIs. And of course, our products are most relevant to us, so getting also into the game of doing the product environmental footprint calculations to see where we are at, what our target is, and what we can do in order to change materials or change products to make it more sustainable for the future. So this is my role, to get the group engaged and to be one of the leaders for Phoenix Contact for everybody to get a direction and to get some knowledge, to build up knowledge that the employees can actually create impact.

Greg Arnot: Excellent. I noticed that you mentioned KPIs there. Can you help me understand a little bit more about the specific sustainability goals you aim for? Is it just CO2 reduction or are there other targets?

Lennart Gorholt: It’s more than just decarbonization. Actually, we split up sustainability into three sectors, environmental, social, and governance, which is quite a general approach, I would like to say. But for us, we adapted it as well, saying environmental topics of course. In the field of environmental, one major target is decarbonization to make a contribution to global warming protection. I don’t want to say global warming potential because we want to fight the warming, so it’s actually reducing carbon emissions, but also in scope one. So our buildings, our facilities to make a big activity in here, but also what we like to call scope three was in our supply chain, upstream and downstream. So it actually creates a change in the materials, in the logistics, and also downstream in the usage, how energy is consumed, where energy is coming from, and how energy is spent. But further, besides environmental, we’re talking about social as well. So we need our employees, our people for that one. So we’re taking a look into our employment. How to make sure that we have, for example, equal pay as a target for us, to make sure that the same people, independent of any kind of diversity aspects, are getting the same payment, at least for a location like here in Blomberg or for India, for example, or China, wherever we’re located in, but also to get more diversity in our teams. We want to be attractive to any kind of person, independent of diversity. And of course, the third field is governance. So of course, we need to be a healthy company to earn some money to pay of course all the bills, but also to make sure that our suppliers, for example, do follow a code of conduct or have no risk in environmental or social topics, but also comply of course to all the legal frameworks like reporting of course, but also for our governance means to engage our leadership into sustainability.

Greg Arnot: Thank you for such a comprehensive overview. That’s quite a scope of ambitions there for just one organization. Lucas, if I can come back to you, can you tell us a little bit more about Nexpirit and its role in promoting sustainability and product development, especially in collaboration with Siemens?

Lucas Dann: Nexpirit has been developing solutions to do the environmental footprint calculation within NX. So there was a joint development between Siemens and our side where we provided the environmental datasets so those environmental datasets have environmental KPIs, CO2 being one of them, but also 18 other environmental impacts according to European standards. We use those data sets for our Siemens offering, but we also have standalone solutions or solutions within Teamcenter to use those environmental data sets for calculation. So we have a team of environmental experts who maintain them.

Greg Arnot: Thinking a little bit more on the PLM side of things, what inspired Nexpirit to focus on sustainability solutions within the PLM domain itself?

Lucas Dann: So the beauty of doing it in the PLM system is that you can take the whole environmental topic from a very isolated audience to the complete engineering foundation. Suddenly, it’s not a few experts who have done an LCA assessment, a life cycle assessment, instead, we now have the chance to emphasize every engineer hotspot from an environmental side. So these are materials, these are products, vendor parts, supply parts, where there is a chance of high CO2, for example, and we can start to react. Because we’re relatively early in the design stage when we’re the PLM system, not earlier than doing it in the ERP system, of course, we can choose alternative materials, maybe we can increase the recycling content of the material or we can adjust our scope three by finding alternative suppliers. So the mission always was to shift left, move that into the engineering context, and this is exactly what NX as a CAD system or Teamcenter as a PLM system enabled us to do.

Greg Arnot: A very good choice. And shifting left makes a lot of sense. Now, Lennart, this has all got me wondering, how did you initially begin your collaboration with Lucas in Nexpirit?

Lennart Gorholt: When we started our journey, we needed to find a way to deal with all these kinds of KPIs to get an idea we’re talking about 10,000s of different materials and having a portfolio of about 100,000 products. So for us, it’s really key to find a systematic approach to do all the calculations. For our customers, they are interested in a single product and want, for example, to have a carbon footprint for this product. We started with Nexpirit together to work when we started the first ideas playing around with some thoughts about how to actually set up this kind of system, how to track the environmental footprint of each material we’re having, and knowing these data would constantly change. Constantly change meaning our suppliers will give us an update and say here, Phoenix, good news, and update, we have decreased some emissions and now your footprint is less for this material. So we set up the first database and said, okay, this might be a way to go into the future to have a first general idea of what kind of footprints our materials have to get the first glance, but afterward also to have an infrastructure to track these changes. And Lucas just said briefly, for us it’s key, not only me to have this knowledge, but our developers need to have the knowledge, the people in the production, the logistics, they need to have the knowledge because they do the day-to-day decisions. So it’s actually the discussion about where to store these kinds of data. These are of course very valuable data, but they need to be transparent to everybody in the company to make wise decisions in a new kind of perspective. In the past, we talked about delivery times but also costs. And now there’s a new dimension coming in saying, okay, let’s talk about costs on the other side about environmental impacts as well. So this discussion needs to be open for everybody in the company. This was a starting point when we made up the first infrastructure script and said this might be the future looking like, where to store the data, then the PLM system came into place and said we have one leading PLM system for Phoenix Contact Worldwide. So it makes sense to store the data exactly there, to have it at the first point, and of course how to distribute this data into different systems worldwide, into different kinds of calculation methods.

Greg Arnot: That sounds like it ended up being very beneficial. Why did you decide to apply the sustainability calculation directly integrated into the design and PLM process?

Lennart Gorholt: After understanding first of our products, we did some calculations and got an idea of what is the impact of such a product. A simple clamp, for example, it’s some brass, it’s some plastics. What kind of impact is it having? What is the share of plastics? What is the share of brass? This was our beginning in the first step. And then think about how can we make a change, and how can we create an impact. And then it was obvious that we say, okay, the earlier you are, the earlier in the product life cycle you are, the cheaper it is. When you design a first time a product really from scratch, starting from nowhere and say, okay, what kind of materials could potentially be interesting for the product? Then you have a free choice. You’re completely free to design like you want and play around with numbers, play around with some ideas and it doesn’t cost you anything. There are no limitations at this point. So the earlier you are, the more freedom you have to make a good choice. If you release such a product later on, your customers are getting used to the product. They know the dimensions, they know the technical abilities, they know the features it has, changing the running production is quite costly. You need to change machines, you need to change materials, you need to change the supply chain. You didn’t talk about technical verification and all this. So the later stage a product is, the more challenging it is to make a change. So really bringing it to the first development stage, then you can make easier changes. So this was the idea to say, okay, we need to have information as early as possible that designers can, when sitting on the table and making some good ideas know, okay, let’s think about different kinds of materials. And this is the best stage we can do. So this was intentional to say, okay, let’s put it into the earliest stage of development as far as possible.

Greg Arnot: And for data management, what system did you choose?

Lennart Gorholt: The data management system is actually a database we designed together with Nexpirit, setting up the information there and storing this data in our PLM, Teamcenter as well. So it should be stored in there. The decision was easy. We needed such a database because there was no database in place by then. We’re not talking about a material database, it’s an extension. It’s more. Just imagine the brass doesn’t change at all, but the footprint will constantly change. So we’re getting regular updates once a year maybe or even quite often. So we need to update this information and track these kinds of changes over time. So this is where we say, okay, we use a database and Nexpirit showed us how it’s possible, what we can do, and of course, bring the information into the system. Because then we’re talking about revisions, how to store these data, how to track these updates, how to release these updates. This is how we set up the database for Phoenix Contact then.

Greg Arnot: If you’re starting a new project right from the start, how does the design process begin? What do those requirements look like?

Lennart Gorholt: We start with, of course, having some basic requirements and defining what requirements we have. By now, one requirement, of course, is to check it for sustainability. So we want to have three kinds of judgments, saying, of course, technical regulations, and technical requirements we need to solve. Also, of course, the cost perspective is always a discussion point. And now we have more, like sustainability. We need to check and say, okay, what is the footprint of this product? We have clear targets to reduce our emissions worldwide. So we need to check our new developments and also our changes in product and say, what is the impact for this product? To which price does it come? For example, talk to one of our developers and say, I get a new idea about a new production technology, can we please discuss about what is the impact? Is it better or is it worse than a usual one? And just running through the numbers, say how much energy is consumed, how much material is consumed? What is the product feasibility? Is it really the same materials? And then you can say okay we’re checking for costs, we’re checking for feasibility, we’re checking for sustainability and then make a good decision and say okay and this time it was a win-win saying less cost, less sustainability so great this is the way to go. Let’s check and qualify this kind of technology to say go ahead.

Greg Arnot: I imagine sustainability must make everything a little bit more challenging. It’s an added level of complexity on product design that we never used to have. As Lucas mentioned, Nexpirit partnered with Siemens to provide datasets for the NX Sustainability Impact Analysis module in our software. Can you say anything about the potential value or benefits of this module for Phoenix Contact?

Lennart Gorholt: We need to support our employees, our people, who are not experts on this topic. So we have the general logistics colleague or the general developer who is perfect in designing new technologies, who’s perfect in designing products, but he’s not an expert in life cycle assessments. He didn’t do the training, not the studies, but we need to support him. So now we need to support him to say, okay, here are the numbers to make life easy for him to make a decision without being the perfect expert for that one. And the sustainability solution will help him on that one. So we can just press a button and say, please give me the numbers, and say, okay, this is my impact right now, let’s pair it with some different alternatives and see what kind of change is happening. So really helping and supporting him to see what his changes in the development or his changes in the supply chain are having an effect on our LCA, lifecycle assessment, or product environmental footprint, however, we name it. But what are the benefits of environmental topics on that one? And then he can actually start playing around, checking about his design, but also checking about alternative materials and just getting a number back and saying, okay, the tool will support him help in and saying, this is your footprint right now. And if you place it around with a different kind of alternative, then you can see how his footprint will change. This way can see how to optimize the product without being actually a well-educated expert in that one.

Greg Arnot: Can you share an example of a specific project where integrating sustainability into the design phase made a significant impact?

Lennart Gorholt: This year we presented one of the new products which was designed for sustainability. It was really the target design for sustainability. The business unit designing this one actually thought about how they would make a change. So they took an existing product and say, we’re going to do a new version of that one. It’s just a connector for a PCB board and saying, okay, what kind of opportunity do we have? And they said, let’s test a new kind of plastic, a bio-based plastic, first time ever. So they said, okay, this is an alternative for us. It has less footprint, it’s a plastic complete alternative, we never tried it out so this was really the intention of the project. So I said around, okay, what kind of alternatives are on the market? They are waste-based, are bio-based, they are recycled materials, and said, okay, let’s play around with the numbers. Bio-based sounds awesome and waste-based sounds awesome as well. So two pilots, and they created these products saying the numbers would be looked like and then they started making the first pilot, produced these articles for the first time ever for us, and launched it to the market. And showing it to the customers saying, here it is, it’s exactly a one-to-one replacement for the alternative. But of course, plenty of questions coming up now, like bio-based. We never talked about this kind of source of materials, now we can talk to our customers, say, okay, is this an alternative you would agree on? Is this good for you? Because we need landmass to grow some plants, resin bones in this case. Of course, some people say, yeah, it’s great. But if you talk about lands where there’s not that much of an area for plants, and we talk about desertification, it’s a challenge. So we really need to discuss, whether is this feasible for the future. What are the customers saying? Is, of course, the feedback good? And from a technical perspective as well, it’s designed first time ever, and now we can check, is it completely the same? How the production technology is, is it the same machines, the same tools we can use, and of course a technical perspective as well?

Greg Arnot: Thank you, Lennart. Can you walk through for our audience how you ensure that sustainability is a consideration in every stage of the product life cycle from design to end of life?

Lennart Gorholt: This is actually challenging. We’re committed to science-based targets by now already, which means we are having a greenhouse gas balance for our companies. So all of the different aspects are in there. We have the materials perspective, but also the use perspective, and also the end-of-life perspective. This would be the company’s perspective, it’s based on the same data, the product level. For us, this is really key to have the same data for both the company level and product level because in this way I can see from the corporate perspective, say, what is our corporate footprint and bring it down to the product level, and at the product level, we call it then a product environmental footprint. We are following some standards like ISO 1440 or ISO 4044, which define that each product needs to follow five life cycle stages, really from the beginning to the end of life. So either recycling or even disposing of depends on really the end of life, what happens to the product, and each product is declared on each of these different kinds of lifecycle stages. So we’re getting a footprint for each of them. And then we can say, okay, what is the impact in each lifecycle stage about the material purchase, but also in the production, but also in the distribution and also in the installation by our customers and end of life? What is the impact there? And then you can see if you bring in new material, you can see if is this a shift in just one perspective or dimension, or is it really a shift in all five dimensions or is it just more a shift in the end of life or use? So this is how we calculate the products, having all five stages in mind and seeing the numbers for all five of them. And then it’s key for different kinds of business units to see where to focus, like active consumers like the laptop or here is the Jabra speaker or the speaker on the table. It consumes electricity, so the main pain point will be the consumption of energy, while other products like this pen, have a no-use phase.

Greg Arnot: That certainly makes sense. Lucas, I’d like to turn to you now. We touched on this only briefly before, can you tell me more about how Nexpirit was involved in the development of the NX Sustainability Impact Analysis product? How does this partnership between Nexpirit and Siemens continue as the module evolves?

Lucas Dann: During the development of the NX integrated sustainability solution, we had a very good and detailed exchange with the product development team and the product manager, Shirish Moore. We iterated on quite a few concepts and we involved also customers to get their feedback on what would work for them to provide the most value add. So Phoenix Contact was definitely one of them who we consolidated and where we took the input based on the previous projects, but we think also with other industries. And then the feedback was always similar, we need to guide the engineers to give them the right metrics to identify where to improve. But it’s not just enough to give a number and a number out of 16 KPIs doesn’t tell the engineer a lot, so we also needed to focus on the core challenges a bit, simplify maybe some of those KPIs, and also provide ways to make your design better. So it was the result of the assessment with most of the stakeholders. We work with the technical team on the Siemens side and our environmental experts who do the data set calculation and then continuously in a very iterative mode develop the first version which came out I think two years ago. And then with every sprint now, we’re adding new capabilities. So just recently we now have the chance to consume manufacturing information directly from NX into the CO2 calculations. So if you have a computer-aided manufacturing application in NX, the way the machine makes, the energy it consumes, how much cooling fluid is being used, and that is then also added into the calculation. So we started based on primary feedback, worked closely with the technical team on what was possible, and now kind of continuously enhancing it jointly.

Greg Arnot: Well, here’s to a lasting partnership for many years to come. How does the design for the sustainability approach compare to a classic life cycle assessment, LCA approach, or calculation?

Lucas Dann: I worked in an LCA company. The problem, which we always saw there, is that LCA was something for experts. So they are in a big organization, three or four people who can do an LCA calculation and they often do that very late once the product is complete. Imagine a pizza. You can first do an LCA calculation if you know everything about the pizza, what the ingredients are on top, what oven you use to cook it, what temperature the oven is set on, and then you have all of the information to do an LCA calculation. But that’s too late. If you want to optimize and improve, you need to guess at the few locations. You don’t know what the oven will be, you don’t know what the temperature will be, you don’t know your electricity mix yet. So early in the design stage, the engineer doesn’t have a manufacturing BOMyet. They don’t know the plant in which they will be producing it. So that’s why we shifted left and enabled Teamcenter and NX to start the early CO2 analysis already based on a generic material they assigned. So if you pick a steel, we know for that steel standard the common CO2 is and then people can start to already improve and optimize from there. So we are not as precise as the LCA, but we can do the analysis before the product design is complete and we can iterate, try different routes, and different variances, find hotspots, and start to improve. So an LCA will be always a lot more detailed, but it’s a lot more complex to calculate and takes also a lot longer. Other customers who do a detailed LCA analysis take months and months of work. What we do on the PLM side and on the CAD side is maybe not as precise, but it works on thousands of product variants, on big BOM structures in an automated approach and you can optimize and you can also do outbound reporting a lot more automated. And if you give the right confidence level or quality level, which Lennart elaborated earlier on, you also have the full transparency to your customer.

Greg Arnot: Can you tell our audience how you decided on Teamcenter and NX? Why were those chosen as the platforms for integrating sustainability into the design process?

Lucas Dann: Historically, we always have been close to Siemens as a PLM partner and that of course opened doors because of the contacts we have. But I also believe that the flexibility that we have with Teamcenter is very open, modular, easy to extend, and the same on the NX side – perfect for adding your own solutions. And the huge customer base is of course very, very beneficial. The chemistry that we had with the product development team on the NX team, trying to reach the same goal and target, helping industries to reduce their impact, and having the same mission statements was one of the reasons why we kind of came into that partnership with Siemens here.

Greg Arnot: Great, that’s the kind of feedback we love to hear here at Siemens. Lennart, with such a large, variant-rich product portfolio at Phoenix Contact, how do you handle the calculation of environmental product declarations for all of these variants?

Lennart Gorholt: It’s actually a challenge because if you want to do it one by one manually, you take ages. We have about 100,000 products, so if you do them one by one, one a day, you will never end up. So,what has changed in the last year because changes in the value chains are changes for us as well. So we need to update it automatically regularly, which is a challenge. We tried to get rid of any kind of manual input for the calculations. So really we have automations running, which are automatically doing the calculations for us for products which are early in the stage, but also which are well-developed products which are on the market, completely finished and running out there, or even products which are not running anymore, even to do up their calculations, what has happened to them. So it’s more about the automatic calculation. This means that these systems we have need to be interfaced with each other so that we can see what kind of databases are behind, use this data, use the current bill of materials, and of course, our current value chain, rerun the calculations, and give us the feedback.

The most challenging point is actually not doing the calculations, but actually checking the results is the real challenge. Because now we have 100,000 PDFs or 100,000 footprints and need to judge,is this right or is it wrong? Which ones are ready for release or there might be any kind of error in the data or is the update not pending or is there some miscalculation? How do we deal with that? Lucas just said, one is of course our quality indicator which is calculated automatically as well. So we can see the change on a product level, seeing which products increased or even decreased in footprint. Is it due to that we got some more precise information on the material basis? Or is it just a random mistake maybe and the quality doesn’t change at all but we can see some artifacts? So it’s really with some first indicator saying, where is this change coming from? Or is it actually exactly the same footprint like last month or last year? And thenwe’re using representatives. So we know some of our products very in detail. We took out some technology representatives, as we call them. So some articles we made very elaborate calculations on, and now we use these kinds of products to challenge all of the family members. So imagine just a clamp, just any clamp, you know it from your households back there and you bought off all the connectors for the switches and so on. So if it’s gray or black or red or blue, for your technician, makes sense to have some color coding in there, but from the product side, it’s almost the same product. Just imagine we elaborate in very detail on one of them and we can say a good footprint for this product would be 17 grams of carbon dioxide and then we can compare to all of the other ones saying if they are the same as the result is just 16.9 or 17.1 it’s the same. Might be due to the color but it’s the same range of footprint. Then we can say okay the calculations are right for them, it makes sense and the difference can be explained, then we can release and say okay it’s good to go because we can compare to the representative and the variance is completely fine for us then we can release it and this is the way how we do it for the whole of the portfolio.

Greg Arnot: And since you’ve implemented this system, what are the tangible benefits that you’ve seen in terms of sustainability?

Lennart Gorholt: The biggest benefits are really about scale and automation. The first calculations took us months to get the first footprint. What do you do with this kind of information? You’re happy you have the footprint for one product and you can see for this product what might be changed. But of course, when you look at the huge portfolio and say, okay, that many products and you want to make some impact, how to go forward? So the biggest benefit I can see is we’re getting away from doing the calculations. We’re getting towards a point saying, okay, I can get the calculation on the press of a button. Now I can focus really on, what kind of change can I do?. It’s not more about learning how to do the calculations, it is more about really having the time, having the possibility to focus and creating change, creating impact. So the systems are getting us into a situation where we say the systems are learning how to do all the itsy bitsy pieces, do the calculations and our employees can now focus on having smart ideas playing around with new materials, playing around with alternatives, really creating the change and then later seeing what the numbers end up with. And so the systems should provide all the support, this help on that one and now this comes more in place and our colleagues can play around with numbers to really follow our purpose, creating change, creating a contribution to sustainability.

Greg Arnot: Excellent. So moving a little bit from the numeric more to the qualitative. Lucas, this next question is for you. How do you see the role of sustainability in the context of the design process evolving, especially in regard to technologies like the digital thread and the digital twin?

Lucas Dann: What is beneficial is that the product model is getting more and more intelligent. So on the NX side, we don’t just have the design geometry there, but we also have information about how to manufacture it. I mentioned the CAM, before computer-aided manufacturing where we can take the spindle speed. So we can pull in all of those dots in the NX part file and what we have on the Teamcenter side and then come to a much more precise CO2 calculation. So the smarter the digital twin gets, the better of course our environmental analysis is. That’s super beneficial. There are a couple of industry trends along the digital thread which help us to also get the scope three data improved. So scope three data is right, the information between for our by parts, for our supply chain parts. Here things like the asset administration shell come into a place where we can get CO2 values, but they also announced other environmental KPIs and pulled them into our PLM system and used them also to calculate then for those by parts the CO2 values and add them to the overall BOM structure. That’s really where digitalization and having it all in one simple place makes a big, big difference.

Greg Arnot: Before we say goodbye, I’d to touch briefly on the future of the field and perhaps make a few predictions. Lucas, from a technical perspective, what emerging technologies do you see playing a crucial role in advancing sustainable product development in the future?

Lucas Dann: The Digital Product Passport is definitely one of them. So that’s an initiative driven by Europe, the same as the asset administration shell, which allows the communication of that environmental data. So in the future, there will be a point in time where everyone has to provide not just price information and technical information for that product, but also its environmental impact. And of course, it helps us, then Phoenix who is buying those products and for example, uses them in their digitalization. And then a couple of data exchange platforms coming up and standards when everyone talks about the same and meets the same KPIs, we can start to do those calculations also kind of across industry across standards. That’s definitely helping. Then maybe looking a bit into the region of AI, artificial intelligence, we can pull in all of those data points and maybe, not everything has to be 100 % precise, but artificial intelligence helps us also with fuzzy data to make the right decisions. Yeah, we need to be careful, AI doesn’t generate data, but it helps us to make the right logic, maybe identify based on the product name, what material could be in there and then use that material for the CO2 analysis. Or compare supplier data with alternative supplier data and then estimate based on that what the typical CO2 value could be. Then suddenly you don’t have to have 100 % of the data in the system, but you can start filling the gaps. It needs to be transparent where AI is involved in my opinion, but that’s also something where there will be a big change in the coming years.

Greg Arnot: It’s going to be fascinating, especially with AI seemingly playing a role in everything these days. Lennart, can you tell our listeners what Phoenix Contact does to stay ahead of the curve in sustainable product development? What advice would you give to other people in the industry looking to do the same?

Lennart Gorholt: For us, the key is really to constantly look for new alternatives, to find new ways, to approach new ways. And it’s a trial and error. Some ways will be good, some days will constantly fail. But it’s really about trying it out, to find it out. Forging ahead for us means trying different materials– I talked about bio-based materials. I can say there’s a long way to go for them to be ready for the market. They need to have all these value chains and preparations. Another example is the recycling of plastics. For the industry is a challenge, the quality of plastics, how to get it in the level of quality we need it for. But we constantly need to work on that one, find a new way, try it, and whenever you find a barrier and say, okay, it’s not feasible to think once again, how might it be feasible. What needs to be changed to get it done? To find a way to try it the first time. And once you have the pilot, you can see, okay, now we see a way which might be possible. So really forging ahead constantly, re-questioning, is this possible or is it not possible yet? There will be ways out there. What I would give everybody out there on hand, sustainability is really about rethinking everything. So there is no standard way to solve our questions. And for me, the key is also to get in contact with suppliers and customers. We can’t solve this on our own. Scope three, so materials and usage, is pure double accounting. So we are responsible for materials which actually are created by our suppliers, their footprint is our footprint. The same for our customers, our footprint is their footprint. So we really need to discuss what kind of alternatives they see. What can they change in order to reach this footprint? The same for us. We have some ideas in mind, but we need our customers to make it happen. If they say, yes, this is the right way to go, then we can make the change. Sustainability, sometimes it’s about having multi-targets, sometimes about solutions that are not yet at the same cost level, which is more costly but does have less footprint, and sometimes you will find a win-win. I’m pretty sure and convinced that the future will change. Even though some technologies right now are not yet in the same topic level of cost, I’m sure in the future if more and more companies go this way, it will come. Everybody was talking about circular economy in the past, but actually, it’s the same topic for decarbonization. If we don’t use material for burning, or incineration, then we can use it for recycling. It would reduce our footprint immediately. So we need to think about different kinds of solutions, which haven’t been there in the market. There was no demand for it in the past, but now the demand is increasing. So let’s think about different kinds, different business models, and different corporations as well. And this would be my appeal. Think everything twice, what might be changed, go brave new ways and search for corporations to see partners, new networks to raise. We have some alternatives and new creative ideas coming.

Greg Arnot: You mentioned earlier how important your people are for Phoenix and it got me wondering how are you encouraging your employees to prioritize sustainability in their daily work at Phoenix Contact.

Lennart Gorholt: I can just say from my experience, it’s a hot topic for them. It’s a purpose topic, sustainability. Everybody loves sustainability. So it’s really a door opener. Once this topic comes in, everybody’s engaged. We don’t have to convince them actually. They want to contribute, they want to give all their heart and say, okay, what can I do? How can I contribute? Because it’s about the world of tomorrow, the world of our children, not our own even because the changes will take time. But when we say, okay, we want to make a change, most people are completely convinced it’s the right way to go and are happy to create an impact as well. For us, it’s really about training these people how to create an impact. Because when we start and say, okay, we can, of course, change our employee commuting and say, use electric cars but for Phoenix Connect, it’s not the key element. For us, the key element is materials and usage. And once we get them in the position that we say, we’re going to train you, we’re to show you ways how you can contribute, how you can bring your ideas and changing the corporate footprint of a company, then they’re completely on fire. And they say, okay, I get an idea. Let’s say, let’s find out what ways are out there. And this is what I can say, it’s for the young and it’s for the old. It’s for females, for men, for diversity. Everybody loves this topic. So it’s really about getting them in a situation that they can participate and then they are completely on fire and loving it. I barely met people who say, “I don’t believe in decarbonization.” Everybody is happy to do it. It’s mostly about having a chance to do it. And this is for us, training them how to, and then of course engaging and saying, we give you an opportunity to make an impact.

Greg Arnot: It’s great to see such engagement. And for any others out there who may be interested, what are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from integrating sustainability into your design process?

Lennart Gorholt: I would say it’s two lessons which are mainly for us. There is no final data. We started with some data, looking for data, and we said, okay, what are the right emission factors, for example? What is the carbon footprint of these materials? In the beginning, I said, okay, we just need to find the right number. Actually, this number is not available out there right now. And if you find it, it will change. This is really horribly challenging because every technical person, every engineer loves to have precise data and loves to talk about precise calculations and now we talk about rough estimations and data sometimes. So it’s really a challenge and the final numbers won’t be out there. They will never come and we’ll take an age to be there, but we really don’t need them. We can start with the numbers we’re having and use these numbers to make the first progress and then constantly improve and improve and improve. This is my second learning, it’s really about doing the first steps. If you wait for it to be perfect, you will wait for all your lifetime. So it’s really about taking the first steps and learning on the way. So doing the carbon footprint calculation for us as well, doing the first calculations, we’re just starting to do the calculations, and then you get some experience. We got some experience and said, okay, this is our learning, these are our improvements, and next time we will make it better. So constantly learning and doing and not waiting or hesitating. It’s really about being keen, being brave to just start the journey, I would say.

Greg Arnot: Thank you so much for that, Lennart. Sound advice indeed. Lucas, can you tell me what would you say to other large companies that are hesitant to invest in sustainable practices and technologies?

Lucas Dann: You shouldn’t see sustainability as a burden, which is another reporting level, which I have to do. Think it’s a door opener to new markets. And it also can differentiate you from your competition. So more and more industries like the big automotive OEMs or in the building industries, you even need to have a CO2 value and other KPIs to even be able to sell your products. And that’s just going to increase over time. So you need to start. Get your BOM structures in place, get your material information in place, and then start doing the first calculations and start optimizing. As Lennart mentioned, the data is never final. Once you do your own first calculation, it’s outdated again, the supply chain changes, and electricity changes. So you will never be ready to start because you’re never ready. It’s a process that has to get into the DNA of the company. It’s then immediately also a door opener for other markets.

Greg Arnot: And before we leave today, what advice would you give to smaller companies or even start-ups that are seeking to begin their journey toward integrating sustainability into their design and development process?

Lucas Dann: With the NX for sustainability, there’s no additional burden for the engineer when using that module. I mean, day-to-day design something, day-to-day select the material and there’s no additional work they have to do, no additional mouse clicks. Immediately they can see where we have hotspots from an environmental perspective. The system also gives recommendations on where to improve. So swap up the normal ABS with a version that has a higher recycling content. So there’s no additional burden and you can already start getting the first CO2 values and then kind of start to optimize from there, get additional metrics in, get your supply chain data in, and then you already have embedded it in your development process without extra effort.

Greg Arnot: Wonderful advice. Thank you, Lucas, and thank you, Lennart, for talking with me today. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Learning more about how Nexpirit helps companies achieve greater sustainability and hearing Phoenix Contact’s insights into sustainability.

Thanks again to Lucas and Lennart. We hope to have you back again soon. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning into today’s episode. Join us again 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.