CLEVR x ET Advisory: Advancing digital engineering in the Siemens ecosystem

Manufacturers of complex products are under growing pressure to balance sustainability and profitability. They must reduce carbon emissions and meet rapidly evolving sustainability regulations amidst global, carbon-intensive supply chains that still rely heavily on fossil-based energy and resource-heavy production processes. All while protecting margins.

For complex products with thousands of components, design decisions have asignificant impact on both cost and carbon footprint. Yet, this is exactly where most manufacturing companies lack the necessary insight to act with confidence.

Most critical decisions happen too early and too blindly

Despite significant investments in PLM, CAD, and MOM systems, cost and sustainability insights remain disconnected from day-to-day engineering decisions. In practice, costing is still managed through fragmented Excel models with limited traceability, while sustainability is often handled as a downstream reporting exercise rather than an input that actively shapes design choices.

As a result, teams are forced into costly redesign cycles, decision making is slowed down by manual handovers between engineering,finance, and operations, and critical knowledge remains fragmented. At CLEVR, we see it all the time. Both the disruption of daily operations that all of these create for manufacturers, and the clear shift in the market. 

Customers are increasingly looking for transparency into cost structures and environmental impact, and are gradually moving away from viewing PLM, MOM, and CAD systems as end goals in themselves. There is a growing expectation that digital platforms should actively support real business decisions, and this is exactly what we are now better positioned to deliver.

From systems of record to systems of decision making

In practice, most organizations still operate in a reporting mode. Cost calculations are typically based on estimations of material costs, labor, tooling, and supplier pricing, while sustainability metrics often rely on benchmark or reference data. By the time these figures are compiled, major design decisions are already locked in, forcing manufacturers to either accept lower margins or go back to the design phase and rework the product.

With the addition of ET Advisory, these insights can now be embedded directly into the product lifecycle, and redefine how decisions are made. By connecting cost and carbon data directly to the evolving bill of materials, we align engineering decisions with manufacturing realities and supplier inputs.

At the same time, we extend this with a deeper understanding of how product characteristics, performance, and market dynamics influence pricing and margin potential. This allows organizations not only to understand what a product should cost, but also how it should be positioned in the market. 

More specifically, manufacturing teams can:

• Define and control cost targets from the earliest design stages through design-to-cost and target-costing approaches
• Build accurate bottom-up cost models based on product structures, materials, and manufacturing processes
• Assess profitability across the full product lifecycle through scenario-based analysis of margins and investments
• Strengthen procurement with fact-based supplier negotiations through purchase price analysis and should-costing
• Create transparent and competitive pricing structures that reflect both cost drivers and market dynamics
• Optimize tooling and manufacturing investments with detailed tool costing insights

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Instead of working with static estimates, teams can model product costs and emissions at component and assembly level, simulate different design, material, and manufacturing scenarios, and understand how these decisions impact both cost and market positioning.

A unified digital thread for engineering, cost and sustainability

With the addition of ET Advisory, CLEVR evolves from an implementation partner into atrue decision enabler.

By activating engineering, procurement, and finance insights across the entire product lifecycle, we can help companies operate on the same data, evaluate trade offs early, and make informed decisions, creating a dynamic and actionable view of product cost, footprint, and value. This is particularly critical for industries such as automotive, industrial machinery, heavy equipment, and defense, where product complexity requires full process transparency and confidence to make timely, data-driven decisions.

Building on our expertise in PLM, Low Code, Data Science and AI, we embed specialized costing and sustainability expertise directly into our delivery model, ensuring that these insights are not only available, but actively used within engineering and business processes.

For customers, this unlocks a fundamentally different way of working. They can leverage value-driven use cases such as design optimization, supplier negotiations, new program planning, global sourcing decisions, and tooling benchmarking, as well as pricing-focused ones like initial price discovery, supplier consolidation, and portfolio cleanup to name a few.

CLEVR: Building the connected future of digital engineering

With the addition of ET Advisory, CLEVR is better positioned to help customers across the Benelux, DACH, and the Nordic regions to not only build their digital backbone, but actively use it to drive cost, sustainability, and product outcomes.

In this way, existing Siemens investments evolve from systems of record into decision engines. And CLEVR is driving this shift enabling companies to move from reactive decision-making to designing products that are cost-efficient, compliant, and sustainable by design.

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