Month: April 2023

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center is striving to become a zero-waste campus by 2025 (i.e., 90% diversion of non-hazardous waste away from landfills) through an economically sustainable waste diversion program. To make progress towards this ambitious goal within a three-year deadline, the medical center must rapidly ramp up its waste diversion and waste prevention practices. The institution has identified three key barriers it must overcome to achieve its zero-waste goal:

1. Staffing and training resource constraints 
2. Lack of accurate and real-time data 
3. Space limitations in its facilities

This case study explores these barriers in greater detail and outlines the solutions identified by the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. As part of the solutions identified, the institution launched an advanced recycling pilot program with Freepoint Eco-Systems, as proof of concept for its full network of facilities. Two outpatient care locations were chosen for the pilot because they are segregated from the rest of the medical campus, allowing for an isolated pilot program. This will allow the organization to train and monitor staff recycling practices in small group settings and evaluate practices, before expanding the pilot to the main medical campus.

To date, several key success metrics have been identified:

As of FY 2022, the institution has diverted 37.4% of non-hazardous waste from landfill.Through the advanced recycling pilot project, approximately 550 pounds of healthcare plastics are collected weekly from the two ambulatory locations.As of FY 2022, the institution has diverted 5 tons of blue sterilization wrap from landfill.From August 2021 to January 2023, the institution diverted 23,558 pounds of healthcare plastics to Freepoint Eco-Systems for recycling.

Read the full case study here.

About HPRC

HPRC is a private technical coalition of industry peers across healthcare, recycling, and waste management industries seeking to improve the recyclability of plastic products within healthcare. Made up of brand-leading and globally recognized members, HPRC explores ways to enhance the economics, efficiency, and ultimately the quality and quantity of healthcare plastics collected for recycling. HPRC is active across the United States and Europe working with key stakeholders, identifying opportunities for collaboration, and participating in industry events and forums. For more information, visit www.hprc.org and follow HPRC on LinkedIn.

Siemens Digital Industries Software and IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced they are expanding their long-term partnership by collaborating to develop a combined software solution integrating their respective offerings for systems engineering, service lifecycle management and asset management.

Increasing competitive pressures, tight labor markets and growing environmental compliance objectives require organizations to adopt a more holistic management approach that spans the product and asset lifecycle. The companies will develop a combined software solution to help organizations optimize product lifecycles, and make it easier to improve traceability across processes, prototype and test concepts much earlier in development, and adopt more sustainable product designs. The goal is to help organizations speed innovation and time to market which can lead to improved quality and lowered costs.

The new combined SysML v1 standards-based suite of integrated engineering software is expected to support traceability and sustainable product development using a digital thread that links mechanical, electronics, electrical engineering and software design and implementation. It is intended to span the product lifecycle, from early design and manufacturing to operations, maintenance, update and end of life management. Initially, the companies are working to connect IBM Engineering System Design Rhapsody for systems engineering with solutions from the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of software and services including Siemens’ Teamcenter® software for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Capital™ software for electrical/electronic (E/E) systems development and software implementation. The companies have also connected the IBM Maximo Application Suite for asset management with Siemens’ Teamcenter software to support an integrated digital thread between service engineering, asset management and services execution.

These integrations will focus on the effective reuse of processes and materials to allow traceability for sustainable product development. This can help companies to make informed decisions earlier in the design and engineering process to help drive improvements in cost, performance and sustainability. For example, companies can more quickly identify under-performing components or design elements that consume excessive amounts of power, or require maintenance or early replacement, and product innovation can be driven through an integrated digital thread that connects the physical and software assets back into product development.

“A significant portion of product innovation and differentiation contains electrical, electronics and software components. Yet, manufacturing companies are struggling to bring new products to market on time, as the current tools, processes, and information to manage these components are siloed and disconnected,” said Kareem Yusuf Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software. “To address this gap, IBM and Siemens are collaborating on a digital thread environment to integrate sustainability practices throughout the lifecycle of a product, from design, production, operation, maintenance and beyond. This connectivity will help enable quicker time to innovation and compliance preparedness, and overall improved product quality.”

Siemens and IBM are also collaborating to create a SysML v2 based solution with a migration path to help customers transition to next generation systems engineering. SysML supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems. Service lifecycle management can assist in maximizing business value for product servitization by connecting service engineering to service maintenance to facilitate new collaborative processes between OEM and operators.

“Together, Siemens and IBM will deliver a simulation-driven systems and software engineering solution that is designed to cover the full operational lifecycle. This can empower our customers to innovate by helping to reduce product development costs, drive continuous improvement and create operational efficiencies across the extended enterprise throughout the product’s operation lifecycle,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “We are developing this to help companies truly shift left by improving extensibility and reuse of systems models and associated data with standards-based solutions in an open ecosystem and to enable our customers to develop better products.”

Kamil Mrva, Chief Information Officer at ŠKODA Group and early adopter of the service lifecycle and asset management solution, said: “We are working very closely together with Siemens and IBM to help us to reach our sustainability goals, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) of products for our customers and support our business transformation with an increased focus on services.”

Siemens will be supported by benefits through IBM’s newly launched Partner Plus program and will offer the solution as part of the Siemens Xcelerator ecosystem.

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries, Siemens Digital Industries Software is where today meets tomorrow.

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. It helps clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com. For more information about IBM Sustainability, please visit www.ibm.com/sustainability.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

Siemens Digital Industries (DI) is an innovation leader in automation and digitalization. Closely collaborating with partners and customers, DI drives the digital transformation in the process and discrete industries. With its Digital Enterprise portfolio, DI provides companies of all sizes with an end-to-end set of products, solutions and services to integrate and digitalize the entire value chain. Optimized for the specific needs of each industry, DI’s unique portfolio supports customers to achieve greater productivity and flexibility. DI is constantly adding innovations to its portfolio to integrate cutting-edge future technologies. Siemens Digital Industries has its global headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, and has around 76,000 employees internationally.

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, the company creates technology with purpose adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to transform the everyday for billions of people. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a globally leading medical technology provider shaping the future of healthcare. In addition, Siemens holds a minority stake in Siemens Energy, a global leader in the transmission and generation of electrical power.

In fiscal 2022, which ended on September 30, 2022, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €72.0 billion and net income of €4.4 billion. As of September 30, 2022, the company had around 311,000 employees worldwide. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.

This document contains statements related to Siemens future business and financial performance and future events or developments involving Siemens that may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by words such as “expects,” “looks forward to,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “seeks,” “estimates,” ….

Note: A list of relevant Siemens trademarks can be found here. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners

Contacts:

Siemens Digital Industries Software PR Team 
Email: press.software.sisw@siemens.com

Hanna Smigala, IBM Media Relations 
Email: smigala@us.ibm.com

Across Dow, we are working with suppliers to find circular business practices to save resources such as water. Recently, we uncovered a way to save water and reduce carbon emissions and waste in an unexpected way – through package labeling.

Product labels are of critical importance to our manufacturing and distribution sites globally. They contain necessary environmental, health, safety and trade-compliant information, to move our thousands of products through the supply chain and ultimately to our customers.

A strike in 2022 threatened to stop manufacturing in some of our European plants. When a major wood pulp producer ran out of stock for blank labels, one of our global label suppliers – Geostick – reached out with a solution.

The Netherlands-based company had started a recycling program to collect and return the backing paper from its labels. “Previously, the backing paper would have to go to landfill waste or be burnt as it is not suitable for paper recycling facilities,” said Anar Rahbarli, Dow’s sourcing manager for Geostick. “However, by collaborating with recycler Cycle4Green and Lenzing Paper, Geostick managed to get the collected paper recycled into new paper products.”

Using the collected waste material as a raw material for new production has significant advantages beyond securing new raw material supply stability. In particular, the amount of water needed to produce new backing paper is significantly higher – an estimated 59,455 gallons of water per metric ton – than the recycled version. In addition, the recycling of 1,000 kilograms of liner saves an estimated 1.5 metric tons of CO2 emissions – the equivalent of driving an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle more than 3,700 miles. An added bonus is that Geostick also provides an annual certificate recording the weight of paper waste received and the associated CO2 savings.

“We have now put in place the collection boxes for label backing at several major sites in Europe, and we are actively encouraging sites in other geographies to adopt the process,” said Paul Reilly, a Dow global business process leader, Integrated Supply Chain. “We also have reached out to our major label supplier in North America and suggested they investigate a similar sustainable approach.”

By collaborating with our suppliers, we are seeking to help drive a more circular economy and make the most of limited resources, including water.