Green by Design: How Digital Transformation Fuels a Sustainable Product Lifecycle

Recent buying trends make it clear: sustainability continues to gain business value. A Deloitte survey published in 2025 found that consumers around the globe have already shifted their behavior and purchasing decisions to prioritize sustainability. Even amid rising inflation and cost of living, many consumers are willing to pay a premium to go green — a fact that 80% of executives believe will drive more substantial cash flows, higher profitability, and higher revenue growth.

To gain an advantage over competitors, business leaders must take sustainability goals from ideation to action. First, however, organizations must tackle three core challenges:

• Identify and focus on the right sustainability goals for their industry and brand
• Track progress toward their goals and gain insights from changing data to adapt strategy as needed
• Recognize that circular product lifecycles require extensive collaboration up and down the supply chain. Businesses must establish continual lines of communication to exchange sustainability data between themselves, their suppliers, and their customers

Like any other central business strategy, decisions around sustainability should be guided by data. By connecting a wide breadth of sustainability data within and between companies, modern Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools like Aras Innovator® facilitate sustainable digital transformation to build a foundation of data capture and measurement metrics that underpin a strong sustainability strategy.

These flexible and data-driven PLM solutions enable organizations to build sustainability initiatives nimbly and at scale — taking a greener supply chain from ideal to actionable.

“Product sustainability data should be digital, accessible, unified, centralized, and accessible during product design.”— Jim Brown, Tech-Clarity

Shift from documents to data to identify sustainability goals

Consider an organization that manufactures packaged cookies and wants to become more sustainable. Should they begin by switching to compostable packaging, minimize the carbon footprint of their bakery, or electrify their fleet of delivery trucks?

To evaluate these investments and their potential outcomes, business leaders would ideally be able to reference a baseline for relevant sustainability metrics. These metrics might include the amount of waste produced by packaging per cookie or the energy consumption of various ovens during different recipes. For businesses still using documents, gathering these metrics and selecting priorities would require tracking down information in siloed files, cleaning it, and reformatting it: a serious investment of resources at scale and over time.

Adopting a PLM solution as part of digital transformation for sustainability allows organizations to capture data in real-time and surface relevant insights. A data-driven approach collects information for each product in one place so business leaders gain a clear picture of sustainability in their organizations and spot areas for improvement. Data can provide additional insight in the form of predictions based on the data and provide a virtual “look into the future” effect.

As conditions change, so will strategy needs

Data-driven decision-making helps businesses make more informed choices, but what happens when priorities change? In sustainability, shifting regulations and climate unpredictability mean businesses may have to pivot their strategy quickly to maintain an advantage over competitors.

To ensure that PLM solutions stay useful, organizations should opt for a platform that can capture and analyze many kinds of data. This capability is essential for managing complex data storage structures like the digital twin. By preserving a digital replica of the product, digital twins offer a unique sustainability advantage: designers can track all parts of the product lifecycle, including end of life, helping them design products with repair, refurbishing, and recycling in mind. Digital twins can offer insights like predictive maintenance or opportunities for performance optimization.

Think back to our cookie manufacturer: the company may decide that they’ll switch to compostable packaging to reduce material waste created by their products. Using a digital twin, this business can trace all parts of its packaging, ensuring that the plastic wrapping, cardboard liner, and sealant are individually verified to be compostable. Engineers need visibility into how design choices—such as component or supplier selection—affect the entire product, not just its sustainability. The digital twin provides assurance against reputational or regulatory risks — because all product information is accessible from any location, companies can show consumers that their packaging is actually compostable and prove its compliance with local legislation.

“The Aras platform is our central station for all of our product-related data. At Tamturbo, we can’t imagine being without it.” – Igor Nagaev, CEO of Tamturbo

Innovation depends on collaboration across the product lifecycle

The full environmental impact of a product throughout its lifecycle includes both the impact of the materials used as well as its impact on consumers and after end-of-life. As a result, creating a circular economy will require manufacturers to collaborate extensively with suppliers and customers.

Let’s revisit our cookie manufacturer once more; let’s say a new regulation requires the manufacturer to reduce the carbon footprint of each of their products by 15%. Evaluating the full carbon footprint of one package of cookies isn’t as simple as combining the carbon footprint needed to mix, bake, and deliver a dozen cookies. The cookie manufacturer – while searching for sustainability – cannot compromise non-environmental requirements, like food safety, brand recognition, allowed ingredient quantities, allergens, etc. To accurately capture the carbon footprint, the company needs to factor in the carbon dioxide created during the growth, processing, and transport of each ingredient in each cookie recipe. Then they’ll need to consider the footprint of their new compostable packaging, as well as their manufacturing facility and other corporate facilities that play a part in marketing and selling the cookies.

This business can use a PLM solution designed to support digital collaboration to receive information about ingredients from suppliers and share information about products with customers. Cloud-based, low-code solutions like Aras Innovator enable even more seamless sharing of the right information with the right collaborators.

The digital thread creates new opportunities for sustainability in PLM

Platforms like Aras Innovator help organizations accelerate their sustainable digital transformation by building a digital thread across the full product lifecycle. From identifying initial priorities to collaboration with partners, these modern PLM solutions can capture many kinds of information with central accessibility throughout the organization. This allows businesses to build a data-driven sustainability strategy that offers a clear path toward meeting key goals.

To learn more about how PLM and the digital thread can help your organization chart a course toward a greener future, read our eBook, Operationalizing Sustainability with the Digital Thread.