January 28, 2026
The manufacturing industry plays a key role in advancing more sustainable production. The DIMECC SuMEx project helps companies identify solutions that enable the reduction of the environmental impacts of production.
The Sumex project is developing a novel software tool that enables rapid assessment of environmental impacts during the design phase as well as an automatic sustainability reporting generation. The tool responds to the growing need in industry to make sustainable decisions at the stage where they have the greatest impact without requiring special expertise. Moreover, stricter regulation also shifts the need of organisations to generate self-declared environmental claim or even environmental product declaration (EPD).
Life-cycle costs and environmental impacts of products and systems are largely determined in the early phases of design. However, most current life cycle and environmental assessment tools focus on post hoc analysis and answer the question: “How sustainable is the current solution?” From a design perspective, a more relevant question would be: “How do different design options compare in terms of sustainability?”
The computational tool under development in the Sumex project addresses this challenge. Its objective is to enable rapid comparison of alternative supply chain and structural configurations during the design process. The tool estimates environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, across the entire supply chain and product life cycle.
A Significant Step Forward Compared to Current Practices
Current environmental impact assessments are often labor-intensive, slow, and require deep specialist expertise. They are typically carried out after the product or production solution has already been largely defined. The key novelty of the Sumex-project lies in rapid modeling and real-time computation tied to organisations’ bill of material (BOM) which integrate sustainability considerations into everyday design work.
The software under development enables:
- Integration of impacts value from suppliers’ EPD report
- An automatic self-declared environmental claim, can be verified into EPD
- Environmental impact estimation at product design phase
This provides designers and engineers with a concrete tool to make informed, data-driven decisions to improve sustainability.
Research, Software Development, and Piloting Go Hand in Hand
The research and development work of the project is led by Professor Petri Helo and Researcher Bening Mayanti at the University of Vaasa, in close collaboration with industrial partners.
The software will be piloted in real industrial use cases, such as supply chains for complex machinery and high-volume electronics manufacturing. The objective of the piloting phase is to ensure the practical applicability and user-friendliness of the tool.
Impact on Industry and the Research Community
The project outcomes provide industry with a concrete means to manage and reduce the environmental impacts of their supply chains. By using the tool, environmental impacts calculation becomes more accessible, companies can reduce their carbon footprint, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive advantage in an environment of increasingly stringent sustainability requirements.
The SUMEX (Sustainable Manufacturing Excellence) project, led by DIMECC and focused on collaboration between companies and research organisations, brings together JTA Connection Oy , Primapower, Vaski group Oy , Danfoss Drives and University of Vaasa. The two-year project is funded by the participating companies and Business Finland. It has emerged from collaboration among companies involved in the MAKE in Finland ecosystem.
