It is often possible for a company to achieve greater overall energy savings by including their products’ entire value chains compared to only focusing on own operations. Yet, although many companies have internal information and decision-support systems that include energy use along the value chain, this information rarely have an impact on decisions and actions throughout the company.

The aim of the project “Adapted decision support for increased energy efficiency in value chains” administrated within Swedish Life Cycle Center, is to facilitate for the various functions of a company to contribute to increased energy efficiency in a life cycle perspective. Through mappings and case studies, different departments’ understanding and use of life cycle related energy data is analyzed.

On November 13 project leader Emma Rex, RISE, invited to a presentation and workshop with preliminary results from the project and open discussions on the findings. Three interesting case studies from Volvo Cars, AkzoNobel and Volvo Trucks were presented with the focus on information sharing and motivations in different functions of an organization.

The main questions that need to be solved are:

How can we increase the impact of life cycle information in the organizations?

How can we create motivation to look both downstream and upstream in the value chain and affect the decisions made by purchasers, designers, sales men and end users?

This project promises a lot for the future and we are looking forward to the final results and recommendations by mid-2018!

Read more about the project here