Session
WE.1.E || Green-Lean-Digital
Authors
Wehner, Daniel; Betten, Thomas; Prenzel, Tobias Manuel; Briem, Ann-Kathrin; Hong, Sun Hea; Ilg, Robert
Abstract
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful and sophisticated tool to gain deep understanding of the environmental hotspots and optimization potentials of products. Yet its cost-intensive manual data engineering and analysis workflows restrain its wider application in eco-design, green procurement, supply chain management, sustainable investment or other relevant business processes. Especially for large product portfolios and increasing reporting requirements, traditional LCA workflows and tools often fail to provide the necessary scalability. The presentation introduces a concept for workflow automation for multi-purpose LCA of large product portfolios and demonstrates its application in realistic industry scenarios. The concept integrates the frameworks of LCA and the Cross-Industry-Standard-Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM). Key aspects of the concept are deep business-, stakeholder and user-understanding, deployment of LCA results in interactive browser tools (i.e. LCA-dashboards and Guided Analytics) tailored to the needs of individual roles and business processes as well as the automation of data preparation, model generation and Life Cycle Impact Assessment based on modern data analytic tools. The demonstration of the concept shows significant time savings when dealing with large product portfolios and broad application of LCA results in various business processes.