3DS Blog

Three years ago, sustainability lived on a slide near the back of the annual report. Now it shows up in the first ten minutes of the board meeting, usually as a question about compliance risk, and usually from a director who’s genuinely worried. Here’s why that shift happened: sustainability stopped being voluntary.

DELMIA’s Back to Basics blog series is your go-to resource for foundational insights into manufacturing, operations, and supply chain management. Designed for both newcomers and those seeking a refresher, this series delves into core topics and addresses key industry questions. Seventy-four percent of manufacturing COOs say their company has a global production system. Only 29% say it’s fully implemented across all sites.

Automotive engineers face a fundamental challenge: creating vehicles that are lighter for better efficiency while also being quieter and more comfortable for a superior passenger experience. These design goals often conflict. Reducing vehicle weight is essential for improving fuel economy in combustion engines and extending the range of electric vehicles (EVs).

1. Reduce: The most effective way to reduce waste is to prevent it from forming in the first place. When you reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you prevent pollution because there is less need to extract new raw materials. To reduce, you can buy used items because they produce fewer emissions than new materials. 2. Reuse: Reusing products allows them to be used to their fullest extent and saves money. The environment will also be sustained for future generations.

Computational drug design is not short on techniques. The hard part is not whether a method exists; the hard part is properly executing it in context. We must select the right method, configured the right way, executed in the right order, and put it into the hands of the scientist who needs the answer. Then we must make sure the result is understandable and has a clear assessment of uncertainty.

Manufacturing a single buffer solution sounds simple. Yet one extra drop of acid can quietly ruin an entire production batch and the expensive proteins downstream. In pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturing, recipe precision isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the line between a released batch and a costly failure. Recipe Management Engineering (RME) addresses this challenge head-on.

A typical tableting cycle begins with pharmaceutical powder blending to ensure compositional uniformity. After die filling, the powder is pre-compressed to achieve light compaction, followed by the main compression, which applies high pressure to form the final tablet. The ejected tablets are prone to developing defects, such as chipping, sticking, picking, capping and lamination.

Your procurement team in Stuttgart just locked in a new resin supplier to offset the latest round of tariffs. The substitution saves 12% on raw material costs. But the engineering change notice hasn’t reached the production line in Puebla, where operators are still running the old formulation. Quality flags the batch three shifts later when test results fall outside specification. Two days of production go to rework. The savings from the supplier switch evaporate in a single weekend.

As industries look for new ways to reduce environmental impact while continuing to innovate, sustainability is becoming a driver of long-term business value. Companies are expected to decarbonize, use resources more responsibly and build more resilient operations while continuing to deliver quality products faster. This is why sustainable innovation matters: it helps organizations create better products, processes and experiences while contributing to a healthier future for people and the planet.

Within engineering ecosystems, projects are often judged by three non-negotiable measures: time, cost and quality. It is largely acknowledged that altering any one constraint inherently impacts the other two. Optimizing to these constraints often requires a careful balance between agility, concurrency and value engineering.