Shifting left: How Makersite and Siemens enable sustainability by design – Transcript
In this episode of The Industry Forward Podcast, Eryn Devola and Neil D’Souza talk about the partnership between Siemens and Makersite and how it demonstrates AI’s role in optimizing sustainability impact in product design.
Sonya Sauve: Hello, and welcome back to The Industry Forward Podcast, where we explore key trends, transformative technologies, and real-world innovations that are reshaping fields from aerospace, industrial machinery, and semiconductor to pharmaceuticals and beyond. I’m Sonya, your host for today’s episode, “Shifting left: How Makersite and Siemens enable sustainability by design.” In our previous episode, we discussed the need for companies to shift left and utilize data earlier in the design process and how AI can assist.
Today, we delve deeper into the topic, looking at how the partnership between Siemens and Makersite is uniquely positioned to help companies make this happen. So let’s welcome back some familiar faces to guide us through this conversation, starting with Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability for Siemens Digital Industries. Welcome back, Eryn.
Eryn Devola: Hello, it’s always great to be here.
Sonya Sauve: We also have Neil D’Souza, Founder and CEO of Makersite with us today. Welcome back, Neil. Nice to see you.
Neil D’Souza: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Sonya Sauve: Let’s jump into it. How does this partnership between Siemens and Makersite help companies get the information they need at the right time and understand the sustainability of their products? Neil, why don’t you get us started?
Neil D’Souza: So what’s actually happening in the background is a lot of magic. Teamcenter sustainability speaks in real time to Makersite’s AI engines in the background. It shoots off this information, Makersite ingests this processes, it tries to enrich this information, calculates the carbon footprints and the lifecycle impacts, generates these models, and sends this information back in real time to Teamcenter so users can see this. And all of that magic of understanding what kind of material it is, understanding how it can be manufactured, is actually connected to all of the past products that you’ve built.
So this is not a simple lookup table saying I’m using steel and its environmental impact is 2.2 kilograms per kilogram of steel, but specific grades, specific components that you’ve designed in the past and are present in your PLM system, all of this is available to Makersite to make a better prediction in terms of how most accurately we can predict what the impact of that product is, at varying levels of granularity and at varying levels of accuracy of the design itself.
Sonya Sauve: So you’re ensuring accuracy across the product development, so you won’t have surprises at the end because the information early in the design process is accurately assessed. Is that what you’re saying?
Neil D’Souza: As accurate as it can be, right? So, if, you cannot create something out of nothing, right? And then, as you create, so let’s give it a cadence, right? So, in the beginning, you’ll have a sheet, and then you will say, “Okay, it is actually, it has these dimensions.” And then you will say, “Well, it’s actually stamped,” and then we’ve put three holes in it. And then you will say, “Well, it’s actually this grade of steel,.” and then you’ll say, “Okay, we’ve bolted on a chassis on top.” And as you create more and more detail in your design, the system will also tell you, give you more and more accurate information.
The important thing is there is no surprises, right? At each step, you are adding information to your design and you’re getting more rich information from Makersite about the impact that it has.
Eryn Devola: So adding on to what Neil just said, it really shows where the magic happens between this expertise that comes with the AI and machine learning of Makersite that brings you that expert that’s almost in your pocket because it comes to you in that same context that the engineer is familiar with. So all of these great benefits, and Neil mentioned this, kind of come up to you in your Teamcenter interface in the place where you’re already used to working.
And it’s like you have this expert kind of in your pocket giving you the insights that you need to move through that whole design process to get more and more precise in your insights as the data becomes more and more precise. And this is really where the magic of this Makersite-Teamcenter partnership comes in, is it gives every engineer the ability to have the expertise of a Makersite expert.
Sonya Sauve: That’s really, really interesting. And do we have real world examples of how this new approach is impacting product development for maybe existing customers?
Neil D’Souza: Absolutely, absolutely. So we’ve been working with customers for the last six years, a little more than six years, and we’ve revolutionized how customers look at products and supply chains. In the past, you would have a sustainability team that would sit in a corner doing two, three LCAs of products a year. And these typically happen towards the end of the development cycle, you develop a nice report, and you publish this together with your product, and you use this for the purpose of sales. And what we’ve seen over these years is that’s the first step, and customers then move from there to actually using that information more upstream to change design.
And this only happens when you break that dependence on experts, because there aren’t so many experts. They’re amazing people, right? But in the world, we estimate them to be something like 25,000 people who know how to do an LCF product. In the next 10 years, we’ll put close to a billion products on the market. There’s no ratio that works in terms of expertise, so you need to decouple that. And we’ve worked with companies like Microsoft in early years where they started exactly with this. They said, “Can we get more granular about designing our products, about the environmental impacts associated with our products?”
And they created this amazing tool that you can now see online, right? So the Surface Laptop, and now they also do this for all of their Azure data centers, which is trying to help customers understand what is the implications of their choices. And this position, their product is one of the most sustainable products on the market. But then they surely, they soon realized, “Okay, now we’ve got a product in the market. Everybody knows what its impact is. What do we do next?” And what you do next is you try to improve it, right? And they worked for two years on it and they released, I think it was in 2024, their Surface 16, which was where they saved 30 percent of the impact on the product itself.
And this is not use phase impact, right? Where you could say, okay, we’re now using more efficient chips and our net green mix of use has changed. This is really designed, redesigned materials, one of the hardest things to do. And to shave off 30 percent is phenomenal. Now we have other customers like Lenovo who are doing more or less, who’ve gone on that same journey. And With Lenovo, for example, this started as a minimum requirement, right? Many customers started like that. We need to create these reports, otherwise we can’t do business. And for many of these customers, when you give them the technology to scale this, it moves from minimum requirement to differentiation, right, and competitive advantage. And that’s where the value sits.
Sonya Sauve: So when we’re thinking about that impact on your product development, do we have information on the market size and how much more opportunity having sustainable products design is impacting a company’s profitability?
Neil D’Souza: Actually, this is, I remember this many, many, many years ago where there was a conundrum. Do successful companies invest in sustainability or do sustainable companies become successful? And nobody believed one way or the other, because there was only anecdotal data. And so the Stern School of Business in New York principally started collecting this information and they looked at sustainable products over the last 10 years or something like that. And what they found is that the growth rate of sustainable products, even under inflationary pressures was twice as good as the market average, right?
If you look at, I think it was about a seven year period, if I’m not mistaken, while the overall growth in the market, 50 percent of it was attributed to sustainable products, they attributed, they were only 20 percent of the sales, which means you can see how fast and how much more money companies made with these sustainable products. I think there are other studies which show that even though people don’t believe this, companies have managed to claim between 5 and 25 percent premiums for products that are considered more sustainable. Not in every segment, right? But like I said in the beginning, a successful product matches what a customer needs to that segment.
So there are certain customers that would pay any price for something that is sustainable. Think of, if you have a baby and you have a product that claims there is all natural materials. Would you pay a little more money for that? As opposed to, we’re buying some chocolate, right? And we have corn syrup instead of real sugar. You know, there’s trade-offs people make, right, in these regards. And I think the statistics have shown that companies that do this right, that understand their market segments and use sustainability as a differentiator for sales, have succeeded and statistically proven this.
Sonya Sauve: So what do we, what can we say to companies that aren’t at that level of maturity yet? What kind of advice could we offer them in order for them to really start thinking about sustainability within that product development process?
Eryn Devola: So I think the first thing, and we’re doing a little bit of that with this podcast, is showing them the art of the possible, letting them know how they can achieve these things and letting them see that. But I think the other important piece is something Neil said earlier about really democratizing and making these types of tooling, not just expert tools, but more available to companies that maybe are starting out that have sustainability as part of their core mission, that are really aiming toward things like circularity. In the past, it would have been very difficult or expensive for them to get access to these types of tools.
And I think that’s a huge key for them. I mean, I always say take inspiration, but start somewhere. But I think with the democratization of the tools, it’s becoming so much easier for people to go from almost no ability to do it, to accelerate extraordinarily fast and bring it to scale. You know, one example, and we hear a lot of this from startup companies that are really driving with this as a part of their mission based on some of the success they’ve seen from companies like Neil mentioned who begin with a sustainable product in mind, one example is Haddy.
It’s a 3D printing, additive manufacturing based company in the US that makes furniture, really committed to having no furniture waste by focusing on looking at the whole product life cycle, using materials that are always reused, repaired, or repurposed, never discarded. But in order for them to do that and to treat furniture as this continuous resource, they have to understand what all of those impacts are, what its second or third life is going to be at the beginning.
And this is where tools like Makersite partnered in with Teamcenter really give them that ability to take that expertise and use it for their scale up company right now. And I think those are the places where you can see people saying, hey, this used to be something we could only do at big companies or only companies that had an expert team available to them or had a huge capital investment budget. And we’re seeing this really take off with the ability of people to use these tools to help them meet their purpose.
Sonya Sauve: Anything to add, Neil?
Neil D’Souza: I think two steps. The first is figuring out how you want to use sustainability, right? Think of your customers first. I want to say this, right? By 2030, statistics, demographics will change. Seventy percent of all buyers are going to be millennials and Gen Z. Despite what you see in the current world of inflation and high costs, they continue to dedicate themselves to sustainability. I think the second you want to look at is regulations. In the news today, we hear a lot about watered down regulations in Europe. There’s quite some pressure in the US for companies, but think about the long-term perspective of this.
Companies and customers are looking for transparency in what they’re buying and what they’re consuming. This is not going away. It is only going to accelerate as we move forward. You look at the digital product passport regulation in the European Union that is already live and making many customers who did not pay attention to this years ago panic today. And the third is geopolitics. Eryn mentioned circularity. And one of the key things to circularity is really the geopolitical pressures, resource availability and how this is going to affect your business.
And if any of these three are issues of concern for your business, I think you need to start acting now. The second thing is you must start small, but you must start in a scalable way, something that can actually grow big. Otherwise, what you end up with is great pilots and POCs that never go anywhere. So look at technologies, and this is where Teamcenter is at the forefront office. It is a technology that allows you to start quickly, but then scale across your organization. And not just for reporting, not just for the end result, but for actually effecting change, for helping engineers design in the light as opposed to design in the dark.
Sonya Sauve: Very good points. Thank you. Now, as we’re concluding the podcast, maybe if we can finish on one key takeaway. So we’ve discussed multiple different aspects of designing in the dark and how AI and lifecycle assessments help. But is there any one thing that you would like the listener to keep in mind as we finish off this podcast?
Eryn Devola: I actually will hit on and maybe steal with pride from Neil here, because he just said something that really resonated with me, which is pilot with scale in mind, pilot with the intention to scale. I think that’s so important. As you try to get started on this journey, think about what this pilot could unlock for you and how you’re able to scale that.
Sonya Sauve: Neil, anything you would like to highlight?
Neil D’Souza: I’m going to copy from Siemens, actually. and something they’ve been saying for many, many years. And this is why I value this partnership tremendously. Siemens is a very long-term thinker, and one of the things that you’ve been saying for many years is shifting left, shifting left across all different kinds of problems. The earlier you identify an issue, the cheaper it is to solve it, and the higher the chance of success at the end. So I think when we think of sustainability, the point is not just to evaluate how sustainable a product is. It is to do it at a time where you can make a difference.
Eryn Devola: We live in great times to be an engineer.
Neil D’Souza: Absolutely.
Sonya Sauve: Thank you both for yet another insightful discussion. It’s fascinating to learn how partnerships like this can help make a sustainable future a reality. And I hope our customers and listeners really enjoyed what we discussed today as well. Please join us again soon for more episodes on the exciting technologies and trends reshaping today’s industries. It has been a pleasure hosting this episode, and we hope to see you next time on The Industry Forward Podcast.
Neil D’Souza: Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Eryn Devola: Thanks, Sonya.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
