TU Darmstadt and Heidelberg Set Up an Environment Portal for Ecological Product Development

More than 1,500 Heidelberg employees, or around eight percent of the workforce, are employed in the research and development of future products and solutions. Around 950 of these specialize in sheetfed offset printing. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is split up into quality gates - from the product idea, business plan, technical design implementation and performance testing, to field tests, market launch, series production and discontinuation. Environmental protection plays a key role in all these processes. “The aim of the project with Heidelberg was to develop equipment to integrate environmental protection into Heidelberg’s development process,” explained Dirk Hanusch, research associate at the TU Darmstadt. Today, developers have access to an intranet-based environment portal that determines and checks environmental requirements automatically using the “House of Environment” and “EcoSpec” databases.