From Design to Influence: Round design throughout Cisco’s product life cycle

The next is an excerpt from our FY24 Function Report, celebrating 40 years of influence at Cisco. Knowledge and metrics are reflective of Cisco’s fiscal 12 months 2024, ending on July 31, 2024.

Round design means designing merchandise, packaging, and methods that allow reuse, decrease environmental impacts, drive innovation, and notice 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 software to assist us monitor progress towards our round design aim. Each new product and packaging design have to be scored within the analysis software and obtain a rating of at the very least 75% earlier than its launch to manufacturing. A rating of 75% or larger represents substantial incorporation of our Round Design Rules into our new merchandise and packaging and counts towards our round design aim. 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 software.

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

Pinnacle Awards

A cross-functional staff from Provide Chain and Engineering received the Sustainability Influence Award on the 2024 Cisco Pinnacle Awards, the best recognition of product and engineering innovation at Cisco, for serving to remodel our firm technique and meaningfully accelerating Cisco and our prospects 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, establish sizzling spots for steady product design and operational enchancment, and alternatives to scale back sources used all through our provide chain.

In fiscal 2024, to deal with the necessity for LCAs throughout our product portfolio, we developed a scalable LCA mannequin together with environmental influence reviews 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 deal with inside and exterior stakeholder curiosity. With the massive variety of merchandise in our portfolio, we began by utilizing this mannequin for consultant merchandise throughout Cisco product households. In fiscal 2024, we revealed our first LCA report utilizing the scalable LCA mannequin.