Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has launched the TCS Product Life Cycle Profiler, an innovative life cycle assessment (LCA) tool that offers a scalable and dynamic approach to product LCA by computing environmental impacts across product lines.
Businesses across the world are looking to enhance their sustainability by decarbonizing their supply chains, reducing their carbon footprint, and building circular business models. Measurement of the lifetime environmental impact of the products they manufacture or purchase is core to their sustainability strategies. Moreover, the environmental impact of any product, determined through a life cycle assessment, influences the purchase decisions of environmentally conscious buyers, creating a need for robust and scalable LCA tools.
TCS Product Life Cycle Profiler enables simultaneous LCA for all products originating from a specific manufacturing facility and offers a comprehensive view of the impact from materials, transportation, suppliers, energy consumption, and processes. It computes environmental impact across multiple dimensions, beyond greenhouse gas emissions, from human toxicity and water use to ozone depletion and particulate matter – and highlights impact hotspots to alert the organization to possible changes. Companies can consequently run scenario simulations for devising low impact, circular product strategies and lead decarbonization pathways.
The solution, built in collaboration with PRé Sustainability, eliminates the challenges associated with conventional LCA systems, namely difficult data management, a non-scalable product by product approach and static point-in-time reports with no insights into impact scenarios or recommended actions.
TCS brings its years of expertise in data management, analytics and digital technologies to integrate primary enterprise data and run activity-based footprint algorithms to carry out product LCA dynamically and at scale, providing actionable insights into environmental impacts across product value chains while adhering to the common governing standards. Additionally, the tool is based on open-source technologies and a cloud-agnostic architecture so it can be easily deployed across different cloud platforms.
“TCS Product Life Cycle Profiler will help our clients identify the changes they need to make their product value chains more sustainable and advance their climate goals,” said Suranjan Chatterjee, Global Head, Strategic Capabilities Group, TCS. “It provides unique granular insights that enable companies to identify accurate and actionable intervention touchpoints. That may mean a change in supplier or the impetus to a whole new product line better aligned with a low carbon economy.”
“Our partnership with TCS addresses the need for customers to have reliable and transparent environmental footprint information for products at scale,” said Eric Mieras, Managing Director and CEO of PRé Sustainability. “It brings together PRé's expertise in the field of LCA and TCS' ability to innovate and transform through technology.”
