Measure your impact to drive sustainable manufacturing at scale.

Most industries have felt the continued supply chain crunch post-pandemic. Aerospace and defence (A&D) suppliers have been hit with particular intensity. From a state of near-zero demand during the height of lockdowns, these industries rapidly shifted to meet skyrocketing demand. Both industries are weathering overall inflation in the costs of raw materials, transport, and labour, as well as supply shortfalls across all three areas. And amidst this great production ramp-up, both industries feel increasing societal and shareholder pressure to adopt more sustainable practices in production and supply chain operations.

However, when manufacturing at scale, tracking sustainability is challenging. Measuring the environmental impact of each step is hard enough, but understanding how these impacts can be reduced is harder still. Delivering improvements – driven by data – can seem impossible.

But with the right framework, it doesn’t need to.

What is Capgemini’s Sustainability Analysis Framework?

Capgemini has developed a scalable and repeatable framework designed to help you gain deeper insights into the environmental impact of your manufacturing processes.

There are three tangible benefits to using the Sustainability Analysis Framework:

1. Visibility. Understand the exact drivers of consumption within your asset as you scale up production.
2. Repeatability. Repeat the analysis across every process in your facility, to pinpoint your highest consumption areas. Instead of starting fresh each time you create a product, the framework scales into a monitoring program, giving you the insights to implement consumption-saving exercises across the facility.
3. Flexibility. As you scale quickly, the framework gives you the flexibility to view impacts by manufacturing process or by impact category, allowing you to create a comprehensive and efficient asset sustainability program.

What’s involved in Capgemini’s Sustainability Analysis Framework?

We’ll take a holistic approach to interviewing key stakeholders. Not just focusing on manufacturing but talking to your sustainability team, your facilities managers, your quality experts. So that you can get the full picture of processes within the plant.

Plus, we’ll delve into background research on your processes and assets, getting to grips with any previous analysis within the business and published literature on the lifecycle analysis of the process. This provides a view of the environmental impacts where primary data is not available and serves as a benchmark figure for impacts under lab conditions.

At the end, we’ll furnish you with a suite of valuable research aligned with your sustainability goals, giving you the data-driven insights to reduce your impact now and as you scale to create new products in the future.

Our experts will focus on identifying key data points to provide comprehensive insights that deliver practical recommendations. You’ll gain a solid understanding of where your impacts are and what interventions need to be made to monitor and improve on an ongoing basis.

These interventions could cover capital investment like new equipment, as well as any policy changes, for example recycling PPE instead of disposing of it. Plus, we’ll engage with your people to work out any behavioural shifts needed to drive real change.

How was Capgemini’s Sustainability Analysis Framework developed?

We developed the framework by working with a leading manufacturer, focusing on Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) as a pilot use case.

Despite a solid understanding of environmental impacts at a manufacturing site level, from smart meter data and waste providers, the client had little visibility around which processes were driving these impacts.

Step one:

Having identified the welding process as the most likely candidate for highest energy-intensive process, we first engaged with stakeholders involved in welding – across manufacturing, facilities, quality, and HSE. We also visited the site to analyse how the process occurred in situ.

This helped us develop a holistic understanding of the process and create a map of the end-to-end manufacturing workflow. Through a combination of the stakeholder interviews and published lifecycle analyses on the welding process, we were able to identify areas of environmental impact for each process step.

Step two:

We then worked with teams across the organisation to identify potential data points for each of these impacts and calculated comparable metrics for each impact point, allowing separate impacts to be compared for materiality. Where primary data at the right granularity was unavailable, we were able to use industry figures obtained during our research phase.

The results:

As hypothesised, the most significant impact of welding was the carbon emissions associated with the electricity required for the power source responsible for heating metal.

The second largest impact was from the shielding gas, which is 20% carbon dioxide.

General waste, mainly personal protective equipment (PPE) and ceramic tile backs, also contributed significantly to carbon emissions when sent to landfill.

Our framework was created on the foundation of international standards that could be tailored to the specific conditions of the manufacturing environment – to ensure we evaluated all relevant areas of environmental impact – but with relevant and tangible outputs.

Many of the recommendations are already being applied across other processes within the site.

Let’s start your sustainability analysis today.

Armed with complete visibility of your most consumption-intensive process you can achieve greater sustainability as you scale to meet increasing demand. We can be up and running with our scalable framework in a matter of weeks, providing a baseline understanding of the sustainability of your process from which both environmental and costs savings can be identified.

We believe this framework enables the Intelligent industry to meet sustainablity and deliver real value for our clients.

Ready to take your next step towards a greener future? Get in touch today to start transforming your manufacturing impact today.