From Design to Impact: Circular design across Cisco’s product life cycle

[ad_1] The next is an excerpt from our FY24 Goal Report, celebrating 40 years of influence at Cisco. Information and metrics are reflective of Cisco’s fiscal yr 2024, ending on July 31, 2024.

Round design means designing merchandise, packaging, and methods that allow reuse, reduce environmental impacts, drive innovation, and understand worth for our stakeholders. We design our merchandise and packaging with circularity in thoughts, aligning them to 25 Round Design Rules organized throughout 5 focus areas.

We developed a round design analysis methodology and web-based instrument to assist us monitor progress towards our round design objective. Each new product and packaging design should be scored within the analysis instrument and obtain a rating of a minimum of 75% earlier than its launch to manufacturing. A rating of 75% or greater represents substantial incorporation of our Round Design Rules into our new merchandise and packaging and counts towards our round design objective. We formalized processes and dashboards to assist and implement the necessary scoring requirement, leading to all new designs launched in fiscal 2024 being evaluated within the instrument.

Cisco’s merchandise are designed to convey our model of high quality and innovation. In fiscal 2024, Cisco up to date the economic design tips to include model necessities and Round Design Rules, together with tips resembling avoiding the utilization of solely beauty and nonfunctional plastic elements and optimizing the product packaging . In fiscal 2025, we'll evaluation the Round Design Rules, methodology, and gear primarily based on key learnings, stakeholder suggestions, and exterior necessities, to determine alternatives to additional our efforts.

Pinnacle Awards A cross-functional crew from Provide Chain and Engineering gained the Sustainability Impression Award on the 2024 Cisco Pinnacle Awards , the very best recognition of product and engineering innovation at Cisco, for serving to rework our firm technique and meaningfully accelerating Cisco and our clients towards key environmental sustainability objectives.

Assessing Our Merchandise’ Environmental Impacts A life cycle evaluation (LCA) is used to mannequin the environmental impacts of a product throughout a number of influence classes over the product life cycle, from cradle to grave. We use LCAs to quantify key environmental impacts of our merchandise, determine scorching spots for steady product design and operational enchancment, and alternatives to cut back sources used all through our provide chain.

In fiscal 2024, to handle the necessity for LCAs throughout our product portfolio, we developed a scalable LCA mannequin together with environmental influence stories aligned to the Worldwide Group for Standardization (ISO) 14040/44 requirements. The intent of this mannequin is to enhance the standard and reduce the resource-intensiveness of performing LCAs. It may be used for many Cisco {hardware} merchandise to handle inside and exterior stakeholder curiosity. With the massive variety of merchandise in our portfolio, we began through the use of this mannequin for consultant merchandise throughout Cisco product households. In fiscal 2024, we printed our first LCA report utilizing the scalable LCA mannequin.