Role: Participant – Assistant Product Planning, Copeland (Emerson Climate Technologies)
Timeline: 2023
As part of my role at Copeland, I contributed to a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study evaluating the environmental impact of the company’s low-sound compressor portfolio. The study followed ISO 14040/44 standards and assessed emissions from cradle-to-grave (raw materials, manufacturing, usage, and end-of-life).
My contribution included:
- Supporting cross-functional data collection and validation, ensuring material compositions, manufacturing energy, and transport data were accurately reflected.
- Assisting in the creation of an LCA Playbook to standardize methodology and reporting across business units.
- Helping prepare a management report that summarized results and identified hotspots (e.g., >99% of lifecycle emissions arising during the product use phase, and significant raw material emissions from steel and neo-magnets).
- Aligning the results with sustainability compliance and product planning discussions.
Impact:
The project provided critical insights for future product redesign, recycling strategies, and sustainability declarations, helping Copeland advance toward greener product offerings.
Internship – Integrating Sustainability into Lean Product Development
Role: Assistant Product Planner (Internship)
Timeline: Feb – Oct 2023
During my internship at Copeland Europe GmbH, I worked with the Product Planning team on a project to embed sustainability into Lean Product Development (LPD) practices. The focus was on ensuring that sustainability became a structured part of each stage of the Stage-Gate process.
Key Contributions:
- Enhanced the NPD Checklist: Consolidated three inconsistent versions into a single, LPD-aligned checklist that balanced efficiency and sustainability.
- Collaborative Refinement: Worked closely with planning professionals to validate activities and integrate practical sustainability checkpoints.
- Top 10 Deliverables: Identified the ten most critical sustainability deliverables across each product development phase.
- Integration of LCA Learnings: Incorporated data bottlenecks identified in a parallel Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) project into development workflows, improving data quality for future assessments.
- Knowledge Foundation: Conducted literature review and applied Lean-Green frameworks to strengthen the strategic alignment between product development and sustainability goals.
Impact:
The internship laid the groundwork for systematic integration of sustainability in product planning. It bridged lessons from the LCA of compressors with future development processes, helping Copeland streamline sustainability compliance and product innovation.