Pressures such as resource scarcity, environmental regulations and customer demands for more environmentally friendly products are causing business priorities to shift. As a result, organizations can no longer afford to view sustainable operations as optional. Instead, they are realizing how sustainability is becoming a necessity and ultimately a key lever for long-term viability.  

In a recent podcast, Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability at Siemens Digital Industries, and Magnus Edholm, Head of Digital Enterprise Marketing at Siemens Digital Industries discuss how businesses can drive sustainability by transforming into a Digital Enterprise. Their conversation covers the importance of sustainable design, the role of data in enhancing sustainability practices and how a sustainable Digital Enterprise extends beyond environmental impact to ensure business resilience and efficiency.

Waste is a design flaw

A staggering 80% of a product’s environmental impact is based on decisions made in the design phase. Companies have huge potential to decrease their carbon footprint by simply designing products with sustainability in mind from the start. But how do they achieve this? The answer is by working smarter and using technology to gain data insights into their products and processes to make intelligent decisions that eliminate waste while also making them more efficient.

Merging the real and digital worlds through the digital twin and leveraging product passport technology creates a rich pool of data that can help organizations meet their sustainability goals. With these innovations, companies can use insights from all stages of the design phase to retrofit future products for reuse or recycling. This approach minimizes excess resources, reduces emissions and ensures that sustainability is embedded in the product lifecycle from the outset.

Why become a sustainable Digital Enterprise?

Building smarter products and designing better processes is part of becoming a sustainable Digital Enterprise. At its core, a sustainable Digital Enterprise integrates data-driven insights into every decision. By merging the real and digital worlds, companies gain the ability to optimize everything they do, from design to production. This is where tools like digital twins and IT-OT convergence work to connect decision-makers at the top floor with workers on the shop floor, enabling actionable insights that reduce waste and increase transparency.

And while sustainability might start with compliance or consumer demand, the real transformation happens when companies realize that the most sustainable solutions are also the most profitable. By designing with sustainability in mind and embedding resilience into every process, businesses can cut costs, reduce resource usage and create products that last—all while contributing to building a greener future.

At Siemens, we’re on a sustainable Digital Enterprise journey of our own. Siemens’ factories in Erlangen and Bad Neustadt are already seeing the benefits of using technology to drive decisions based on data. By adopting advanced technologies like AI, the digital twin and energy management solutions, the Erlangen factory is continuously driving efficiency. One example is the use of our SaaS-based energy manager. This tool measures energy consumption across the facility to continuously optimize energy usage. Through data, the factory optimizes its energy use while minimizing waste. This is a testament to the principle that you can only improve what you can measure.

Erlangen and Bad Neustadt demonstrate how collaboration, digital tools and ecosystem partnerships drive measurable impact. Sustainability is a collective requiring collaboration between companies, industries and even nations. At Siemens, we‘re focused on leading by example to show how sustainability isn’t a checkbox; it’s a strategy for long-term success. The journey may look different for every company, but the goal remains the same: to build a future that works for both companies and the environment.

For more detailed insights, listen to the full podcast.