Partner Spotlight: Interview with Fabian Hassel of Makersite

The partnership between ecoinvent and Makersite is a powerful combination of LCA expertise and cutting-edge digital technology. Leveraging the combined strengths of both organizations provides a comprehensive solution for sustainable product development. ecoinvent’s database provides inventory data for complete supply chains, while Makersite’s platform enables teams to collaborate, monitor and optimize product sustainability, compliance, and cost in real time.

To highlight how ecoinvent data is used across Makersite’s products by their customers, we spoke with Fabian Hassel, Makersite’s VP of Services.

What is Makersite?

Makersite is a cloud-based AI software solution combining more than 140 external data sources and automatically generating digital twins of every product and process used by an organization and its value chain. The digital twins provide granular insights across more than 40 criteria, including GHG emissions, supply risk, costs, health & safety, and regulatory compliance. With that, product development, procurement, and experts can analyze products, suppliers, and materials across the dimensions of sustainability, cost, risk, and regulations.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Neil D’Souza, the Stuttgart-based company has a team of over 50 employees across Europe, the United States, and Asia and a customer portfolio that includes major companies such as Microsoft, Schaeffler, Cummins, and Vestas.

How do you use databases like ecoinvent in your platform?

Databases like ecoinvent are incredibly worthwhile for our customers. The database allows Makersite to adapt every dataset to our customers in detail. The important thing really is that there is a possibility to customize the generic database. So, for example, instead of mapping a generic electronic data set, we can take the ecoinvent data and modify it to our clients’ supply chain situation set in a fully automated fashion. This changes the value of result precision and risk evaluation drastically.

There are databases that give you similar data sets as ecoinvent, but they’re different in that they show you opaque results. Let’s take steel as an example. In ecoinvent you see a steel dataset and how it is produced. With other databases you can only see the result. There’s no information about the process that happened to make the steel. Without this step, you lose the possibility to customize the data to the customer’s situation.

What role does Makersite’s AI play here?

ecoinvent alone is a generic and transparent database. Our software and AI play a critical role in bringing that data together with customer data. Our technology automatically customizes data from ecoinvent and 140 other databases onto the customer’s product and supply chain data. We can thereby ensure that the result that our customers use has the highest precision possible – not only for one product but for the whole product range of customers.

What is the Makersite team looking forward to in the next year?

We closed a significant Series A round at the end of 2022 to scale the business in Europe and North America. Partner integrations like the one with Autodesk will be a core technology focus for the near term, next to working with integrators and value-added resellers, unlocking further scale.

What are the greatest challenges that Makersite’s customers are looking to solve?

Customers use Makersite to get to Net Zero, accelerate their product design, and build more resilient supply chains. Sustainability managers, product engineers, and procurement officers all have their own overlapping challenges with reaching the aforementioned goals. They mostly lack insight into the deep-tiers of their supply chains, the possibility to collaborate with each other and with suppliers, have a lack of and dependency on sustainability experts, scattered or non-existent material and supply chain data, etc.

Makersite’s AI and Knowledge Graph-powered platform is a powerful solution for managing complex products and supply chains. With its ability to clean, connect and enrich cross-departmental data with third-party sources, it removes the dependency on sustainability, cost, and risk experts. The platform provides an array of product and supply chain-related information across sustainability, cost, and compliance metrics. Our AI algorithms automatically detect and connect product components and manufacturing processes to the right supply chain data from a harmonized and hyper-connected database, which solves one of the most time-consuming problems of mapping data to multiple sources at a granular level. The result is a detailed, extremely specific view into deep-tier supply chains, giving users a better understanding of environmental footprints, should-costing, and compliance risks at an unprecedented speed.

Could you please provide some examples of how Makersite’s customers leverage your technology to meet their sustainability goals?

A leading global supplier to the automotive and industrial sectors for over 75 years set a target of achieving a CO₂ reduction in their supply chain by 2040.

To achieve a climate-neutral supply chain, the company aims to reduce the carbon footprint of its raw materials by 25% by 2030. The challenge is that 90% of the raw materials used to make electric motors are sourced from China with little to no deep-tier insight into emissions. A common challenge faced by many manufacturers today. The company had developed an optimized supply chain that was just as reliable as its current China-centric one. However, they were left wondering if this new supply chain is any better in terms of the carbon footprint?

Again, they were faced with the challenge of no deep-tier visibility into supplier emissions. Using the Makersite supply chain and materials database, a digital twin was developed in a matter of weeks, of the company’s electric motors’ current and optimized supply chain. The supply chain team was then able to visualize and compare the CO2e at each stage of the process and identified three separate variables which contributed to CO2e in their current supply chain. Of the three variables, the electricity used in the processing of raw materials was shown to significantly decrease the CO2e of the new optimized supply chain. Mainly due to the switch from a Chinese manufacturer to one in Norway.

More examples of how Makersite helps customers achieve their sustainability goals can be found on our website.