One Partnership, Working Together at Every Stage

Most companies pursuing product sustainability find themselves in one of two situations.

Some need to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) for a single product or a small number of products, usually driven by a specific customer request or a tender requirement. Others may be challenged with an entire catalogue to work through, assessing hundreds or thousands of products, each requiring granular, product-level reporting. This need is typically driven by regulation or company-wide sustainability initiatives and commitments.

Whether the need is a one-off assessment for a single product or a large-scale initiative spanning an entire product portfolio, Makersite’s Product Lifecycle Intelligence software and SE Advisory Services, Schneider Electric’s global consulting practice, support organisations at every stage of the sustainability journey.

Delivering this kind of reporting is challenging because the underlying data is often fragmented, incomplete, and spread across multiple systems. Bills of materials (BOMs), product specifications, supplier data, and compliance records typically reside in enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), product data management (PDM), computer-aided design (CAD), and BOM systems that were never designed to work together seamlessly. Before a product can be assessed, this data must be collected, standardized, and connected in a way that supports each stage of the reporting process.

The question is no longer whether businesses need this data, but how quickly and cost-efficiently they can generate it. Most solutions address only part of the challenge, offering either software without expertise guiding decisions or consulting services that are difficult to scale.

Together, Makersite and SE Advisory Services bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Makersite provides the AI-powered platform, automation, and data enrichment that bring disparate data sources together into a single, reliable foundation for sustainability teams, while SE Advisory Services brings the expertise needed to turn that data into actionable decisions. Organisations gain access to product sustainability insights today, with a clear path to scale their capabilities as their needs evolve.

Choosing the right starting point

If a business needs assessments on a select number of products, SE Advisory Services consultants use the Makersite platform to conduct these on your behalf and help you interpret what the results mean for each product.This gives businesses access to Makersite’s product intelligence without the cost and complexity of implementing and managing the platform themselves.

As business needs grow, whether that means assessing more products, integrating with other internal systems, or conducting recurring analysis, the two teams work together to build out a full Makersite implementation. Makersite provides the platform, automation, and data enrichment, reducing analysis from months to minutes. SE Advisory Services sets the direction, leads the implementation, and connects the results to the broader sustainability strategy. This approach not only addresses immediate needs but also helps companies build the data foundation and internal capabilities required for future reporting, disclosure, and product sustainability demands.

In practice, this often starts small. Using SE Advisory Services’ in-house Makersite license, consultants can run pilot assessments across a handful of products to map out what’s involved in gathering, structuring, and cleaning the underlying data, grounded in current best practice in product-level environmental accounting. This gives organizations a realistic view of the data landscape they’d need to build before scaling, so any decision to move to a full implementation is based on evidence, rather than assumption.

Turning product data into actionable insights

Across both routes, the partnership supports:

• Life Cycle Assessment: the full environmental picture of a product, from raw materials through to end of life.
• Product Carbon Footprint: when carbon is the specific number you’ve been asked for.
• Environmental Product Declarations: the verified, published output that customers and procurement teams request.
• Compliance analysis: checking products against the regulations they need to meet.
• Hotspot identification: identifying where the biggest impacts sit, whether that’s a specific material or process, or a particular supplier or location.
• Eco-design: shaping a product before its design is locked in.

Stronger Together

The partnership builds on a broader relationship between Schneider Electric and Makersite. Schneider Electric uses Makersite internally to support its own sustainability initiatives, SE Advisory Services delivers Makersite-powered assessments to customers, and SE Ventures is an investor in the company. This gives SE Advisory Services first-hand experience with the platform, enabling us to provide practical guidance grounded in real-world application, not just product knowledge.