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Within the aerospace industry there is a growing interest in evaluating and reducing the environmental impacts of products and related risks to business. Consequently, requests from governments, customers, manufacturers, and other interested stakeholders, for environmental information about aerospace products are becoming widespread. Presently, requests are inconsistent and this limits the ability of the aerospace industry to meet the informational needs of various stakeholders and reduce the environmental impacts of their products in a cost-effective manner. Energy consumption is a significant business cost, risk, and a simple proxy value for overall environmental impact. This paper presents the initial research carried out by an academic and industry consortium to develop standardised methods for calculating and reporting the embodied manufacturing energy content of aerospace products.

Quality has been the illustrious word of the 80s and 90s as we speak organizations are chasing quality problems through the engineering teams and into production. Taskforces of workers in white coats are being sent on to the production line to furiously check components, monitoring process capability in an attempt to improve product quality. Unfortunately it's only after several years of production that the first “real” data gets back to the engineering teams, when it is often too late to remove the causes of these quality problems. The organization is left kicking itself over the same old catch twenty-two situations, “If only the team knew this process data before they decided to engineer it like that!”