Defining Product Sustainability Hotspots to Enhance Business Opportunities
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
- Africa
- Middle East
- America
Country
- Italy
- United States
Product
- Sphera’s Sustainability Consulting
- Product Sustainability (GaBi) software
- Product Sustainability Databases
Tech Stack
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model
- Automated eco-design tool
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Environmental Impact Reduction
- Productivity Improvements
- Innovation Output
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Electronics
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Manufacturing System Automation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Whirlpool Corporation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of home appliances, with approximately $22 billion in annual sales, 69,000 employees, and 54 manufacturing and technology research centers as of 2021. The Fortune 500 company markets Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Maytag, Consul, Brastemp, Amana, Bauknecht, Jenn-Air, Indesit, Hotpoint, and other major brand names in nearly every country throughout the world. In Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), it has approximately 24,000 employees, a sales presence in more than 30 countries, and manufacturing sites in eight countries. Whirlpool EMEA is an operating segment of Whirlpool Corporation. Whirlpool Corporation’s European Operations Center is located in Pero, Italy.
The Challenge
Whirlpool Corporation, a global manufacturer of home appliances, faced several challenges. They needed to quantify the environmental impacts of their products throughout their entire life cycle to improve their environmental performance. They also wanted to integrate environmental KPIs among the main drivers of product development. Furthermore, they aimed to identify potential areas of improvement and hotspots that needed to be addressed in a conscious PCR development for refrigerators.
The Solution
Whirlpool EMEA worked with Sphera to create an automated eco-design tool that enables the company to perform environmental impact analyses of its products throughout their life cycle, identify hotspots and areas for improvement, and compare alternative product scenarios. As a foundation of the tool, Sphera’s sustainability experts developed a parameterized Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model to represent different refrigerator types using Sphera’s Product Sustainability (GaBi) software and databases. Sphera’s Sustainability Consulting and Product Sustainability Software and Databases help organizations improve the environmental performance of their products and services by enabling data-driven decisions during design and planning, advancing product innovation and eco-design, and providing access to industry-based, high-quality Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data.
Operational Impact
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Remote Temperature Monitoring of Perishable Goods Saves Money
RMONI was facing temperature monitoring challenges in a cold chain business. A cold chain must be established and maintained to ensure goods have been properly refrigerated during every step of the process, making temperature monitoring a critical business function. Manual registration practice can be very costly, labor intensive and prone to mistakes.
Case Study
Predictive maintenance in Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric Le Vaudreuil factory in France is recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the world’s top nine most advanced “lighthouse” sites, applying Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies at large scale. It was experiencing machine-health and unplanned downtime issues on a critical machine within their manufacturing process. They were looking for a solution that could easily leverage existing machine data feeds, be used by machine operators without requiring complex setup or extensive training, and with a fast return on investment.
Case Study
Cloud Solution for Energy Management Platform-Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric required a cloud solution for its energy management platform to manage high computational operations, which were essential for catering to client requirements. As the business involves storage and analysis of huge amounts of data, the company also needed a convenient and scalable storage solution to facilitate operations efficiently.
Case Study
Leveraging the IoT to Gain a Competitive Edge in International Competition
Many large manufacturers in and outside Japan are competing for larger market share in the same space, expecting a growing demand for projectors in the areas of entertainment, which requires glamor and strong visual performance as well as digital signage that can attract people’s attention. “It is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate ourselves with stand-alone hardware products,” says Kazuyuki Kitagawa, Director of Service & Support at Panasonic AVC Networks. “In order for Panasonic to grow market share and overall business, it is essential for us to develop solutions that deliver significant added value.” Panasonic believes projection failure and quality deterioration should never happen. This is what and has driven them to make their projectors IoT-enabled. More specifically, Panasonic has developed a system that collects data from projectors, visualizes detailed operational statuses, and predicts issues and address them before failure occurs. Their projectors are embedded with a variety of sensors that measure power supply, voltage, video input/ output signals, intake/exhaust air temperatures, cooling fan operations, and light bulb operating time. These sensors have been used to make the projector more intelligent, automatically suspending operation when the temperature rises excessively, and automatically switching light bulbs. Although this was a great first step, Panasonic projectors were still not equipped with any capability to send the data over a network.
