About

Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses for over 55 years. TCS aims to drive positive change through innovation and collective knowledge.

Challenge

Businesses worldwide are increasingly focusing on enhancing 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 (LCA), influences the purchase decisions of environmentally conscious buyers. However, conventional LCA studies are difficult to scale up, involve complex data management and produce static point-in-time reports. This creates a pressing need for more robust and scalable LCA tools that can help businesses take their sustainability efforts to the next level.

Solution

The TCS Product Life Cycle Profiler is an innovative life cycle assessment solution that eliminates the challenges associated with conventional LCA systems and offers a scalable and dynamic approach to product LCA by computing real-time the environmental impacts across product lines. The solution is a product of the collaboration between Tata Consultancy Services and PRé and addresses the need for reliable and transparent environmental footprint information for products at scale. It brings together PRé’s expertise in the field of LCA and TCS’ ability to innovate and transform through technology.

TCS Product Life Cycle Profiler enables simultaneous life cycle assessment for all products originating from a specific manufacturing facility. It offers a comprehensive view of the impact from materials, transportation, suppliers, energy consumption, and processes. The tool computes environmental impact across nearly 20 categories, ranging from global warming potential and human toxicity to water used and ozone depletion. It highlights impact hotspots to alert the organization to possible changes. Companies can run scenario simulations for devising low impact, circular product strategies and lead decarbonization pathways. The Product Life Cycle Profiler is powered by the SimaPro life cycle assessment software through its API-enabled online platform.

Benefits

The TCS Product Life Cycle Profiler can help companies reduce their LCA costs up to 70% and perform LCA with higher frequency. This results in regular monitoring of the environmental impact of a manufacturing facility and valuable insights for decarbonization programs. By offering better insights into environmental impact hotspots across the product value chain, the tool helps companies identify opportunities for green initiatives and further reduce their carbon footprint. 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. 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.

Suranjan Chatterjee, Global Head, Strategic Capabilities Group at TCS