Transforming sustainability into competitive advantage with Teamcenter Sustainability Lifecycle Assessment

Sustainability is rapidly transforming from a peripheral concern into a defining competitive factor for manufacturers. What began as a compliance exercise has evolved into a core requirement for winning business, securing market access, and demonstrating responsible innovation. Today, companies must not only understand the environmental impact of their products — they must deliver accurate, scalable, and verifiable insights across their entire portfolio.

Two use cases are driving this shift with particular urgency: regulatory reporting and eco-design.

Regulatory reporting: From mandatory burden to strategic necessity

As sustainability becomes a deciding criterion in major procurement processes, manufacturers are increasingly required to provide environmental declarations such as Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs), Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). These disclosures are no longer optional; they are prerequisites for participating in large tenders and safeguarding revenue streams.

Yet the operational burden is immense.
Manufacturers face a volume challenge, with product portfolios that may contain hundreds or thousands of items — each requiring its own environmental assessment. They also face an accuracy challenge, as today’s regulators and customers expect declarations that are transparent, traceable, and consistent across the entire portfolio. Reliance on manual processes and fragmented data makes it nearly impossible to keep pace with rising expectations.

Eco-Design: Turning data into better products

Once companies begin measuring environmental impacts at scale, these insights naturally become benchmarks for improvement. Sustainability metrics unlock opportunities to reduce carbon footprints, use materials more efficiently, and improve performance over a product’s lifecycle. The result is a new strategic imperative: eco-design, where environmental performance becomes a design parameter as fundamental as cost, quality, or manufacturability.

But here too, manufacturers encounter bottlenecks. Engineers and designers are now expected to integrate sustainability into everyday decision-making, often without the specialized expertise in interpreting Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) data. Meanwhile, sustainability teams remain small and overextended, and existing tools are not designed to support iterative, design-level trade-offs. The result is a clear ambition limited by a lack of operational capacity.

Introducing Teamcenter Sustainability Lifecycle Assessment

To bridge the widening gap between sustainability goals and operational ability, we are introducing Teamcenter Sustainability Lifecycle Assessment — a transformative solution deeply integrated within the Teamcenter ecosystem. This innovation extends the digital thread with critical environmental, regulatory, and cost intelligence, making sustainability actionable where it matters most: directly within product development.

Teamcenter® serves as the central system where customers manage their complete product definition — including the bill of materials (BOM), materials, manufacturing processes, mass properties, and supplier part information. Through integrations with MCAD, ECAD, simulation, and manufacturing tools, Teamcenter provides a comprehensive, accurate foundation for early-stage product development.

With the introduction of Teamcenter® Sustainability Lifecycle Assessment, we now enrich the BOM with sustainability intelligence. This is enabled through deep integration with Makersite solution to leverage their advanced LCA, cost, supply-chain-risk, and AI-driven modeling capabilities.

How it works

• Teamcenter sends the product BOM, materials, manufacturing processes, and manufacturer part information to Makersite using the new LCA Integration Gateway
• The semantic model framework of the integration gateway ensures Teamcenter’s data model remains provider-agnostic while enabling Makersite to consume product information reliably and consistently
• Makersite combines the primary product data with its database of 140+ external sources, filling data gaps using AI/ML and building a complete, ISO-compliant LCA model
• Environmental impacts, supply-chain risk indicators, should-cost insights, and other KPIs are calculated in Makersite and then published back into Teamcenter, enriching the BOM with actionable sustainability data

By embedding LCA intelligence directly into the engineering backbone, manufacturers can:

• Integrate sustainability, cost, and supply-chain insights directly within core engineering and product development workflows
• Accelerate and improve LCA quality using AI-driven gap filling and automated data enrichment
• Standardize environmental reporting with transparent, traceable, ISO-aligned models across the entire portfolio
• Generate PCFs, LCAs, and EPDs at scale without relying on manual spreadsheets or disconnected tools
• Automate sustainability disclosures by reusing accurate data already present in the digital thread
• Respond confidently to regulatory, customer, and tender requirements, reducing risk and avoiding last-minute data collection
• Design greener, safer, and more competitive products from the outset, optimizing sustainability alongside performance, cost, manufacturability, and supply-chain risk
• Turn compliance into a competitive advantage through faster, higher-quality environmental product information

Above all, Teamcenter Sustainability Lifecycle Assessment empowers teams to create greener, safer, and more competitive products — not through late-stage correction, but by design.