Autodesk partnership bringing sustainability into product design

Autodesk, the leader in product design software, expands partnership with Makersite across Inventor and Fusion.

Product design

“Providing tools to design and make more innovative, sustainable products is an Autodesk core value and central to our strategy. Enabling Inventor customers to uncover sustainability insights right in the product they’re already using, leveraging Makersite’s market-leading supply chain intelligence and material analysis data to do so, is exactly the kind of workflow efficiency we’re building into all our tools.”

Stephen Hooper

Autodesk Vice President & General Manager, Autodesk Inventor & Fusion 360

“It’s Autodesk’s intent to make designing for sustainability easily accessible, and ultimately intuitive, to product designers. By partnering with Makersite, we’ve created a holistic workflow within Fusion that provides insights into sustainable design directly within the design environment. Data-driven analysis from Makersite will enable manufacturers to make better decisions about creating safer, more sustainable products.”

Profile image of Zoe Bezpalko

Zoé Bezpalko

Autodesk Senior Design and Manufacturing Sustainability Manager

“Deepening our partnership with Autodesk will provide more engineers with the powerful data needed to make more sustainable design choices. The collaboration also exemplifies our commitment to seamlessly integrate data on production costs, risk, regulatory compliance, and sustainability into existing environments, accelerating development timelines and reducing the reliance on sustainability experts in the process.”

Neil D'Souza

Neil D’Souza

Makersite Founder and CEO

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Makersite’s sustainability and cost data is available to Autodesk Inventor users, enabling engineers to analyze their products’ design, sustainability, and compliance factors during the design phase. Makersite’s platform is also available for Autodesk Fusion users through the Makersite add-on.

Makersite and Autodesk’s partnership empowers product designers and engineers to innovate more sustainable products at a faster pace by putting deep-tier supply chain and sustainability data directly into their hands, inside the CAD tools they’re already using.

Sustainability begins at the heart of the product: its design phase. Still, less than 1% of products have sustainability as a design parameter. Even though the wish for sustainable products grows and emission regulations worldwide are becoming more and more, incorporating sustainability at the design level has been a challenge for most product designers in the past. Our partnership with Autodesk is aiming to change this. 

Below, we’ll expand on what the partnership means for both Inventor and Fusion users.

Makersite & the Inventor add-on

Since 80% of an organization’s environmental footprint is determined during the product design stage, insight into sustainability metrics during the product development process is crucial – but can make optimizing products more complex. Makersite’s solution provides AI-enhanced digital twin models of products and their supply chains, sourcing data from more than 140 material, process, and supplier databases. This brings organizations more clarity into their supply chains and insight into their overall environmental impacts.

In turn, this creates a need to have the data available in the CAD environment, enabling product designers and engineers to leverage that data during their decision making process and, therefore, decrease timelines and enhance efficiency.

Our partnership with Autodesk allows us to provide sustainability and cost data in Inventor. Our add-on allows engineers to analyse their product during the design phase and run various scenario analyses to ensure their design meets business needs on design, sustainability and commercial requirements.

What makes the partnership unique?

It’s our capability to analyse the custom material library of an organisation – not just the Inventor library. Makersite builds a supply chain model behind every product by bringing in intelligence from other organisation systems from PLM and ERP, thus increasing accuracy of the calculated data provided to engineers.

Often, companies lack a deep understanding of their products. We believe that the only way to improve existing products – and to develop more sustainable new products – is by leveraging the data available across various systems in use, and then providing this intelligence to different stakeholders in their own native environments.

Take a look at the Inventor add-on

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The Makersite Addon will be available for Inventor license holders soon from the Autodesk App Store.

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The Fusion 360 plug-in features

With the Makersite Fusion plug-in, product designers can instantly calculate the environmental and cost impacts of their design at the push of a button. With access to more than 300 materials, cost, and sustainability insights, designs can be evaluated for more than 50 criteria such as compliance, risk, health, safety, and, of course, sustainability in real-time.

Decreased time to market without sustainability experts

With this ground-breaking approach, product designers will no longer depend on experts or consultancies to design sustainable products. Instead, enterprise manufacturers will be able to use their own material masters and procurement data to enable teams to work toward sustainability goals led by design. This integration will enable more sustainable and successful designs, eliminate duplicative efforts and decrease time to market.

Visit the Autodesk App Store

Screenshot of Makersite Add-on for Autodesk Fusion 360

Take a look at the Fusion plug-in

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As a Fusion 360 user, Makersite’s add-on has been transformative for Premier Tech. It helps us achieve our effort on carbon emission reduction goals by quickly converting CAD models into Bills of Materials, streamlining project execution, and supporting sustainability-focused designs.

Colin Côté

Senior Industrial Designer at Premier Tech