Arconic – Viswas Nair – 2023

Goals

Arconic is a global aluminum manufacturer supplying to the aerospace, automotive, packaging, and building & construction sectors. Across the aluminum industry, increasing external scrap intake to improve circularity via recycled content use is a key decarbonization strategy.

Arconic enlisted Viswas Nair to analyze business processes in the U.S. and Europe and recommend a framework to trace and measure scrap and material flow in Arconic’s value chain to improve its recycled content performance.

Solutions

To achieve these goals, Viswas

• Identified challenges and opportunities with multiple business functions across four manufacturing locations to improve material traceability and measurements
• Mapped current state of systems, processes, data sets, key users, and reports
• Proposed data collection and calculation methods for consistent and accurate recycled content metrics, as well as a convergence strategy for locations with different IT systems and production capabilities
• Engaged with corporate and regional IT teams to facilitate centralized aggregation of material data to enable automated recycled content tracking and dashboard visualization

Potential Impact

The proposed solutions are intended to:

• Increase system and operational coherency across multiple Arconic manufacturing plants
• Reduce material wastage and improve operational efficiency
• Reduce manual effort and human errors in material tracking
• Enable third-party audit checks for chain of custody and recycled content certification
• Improve LCA pre-consumer and/or post-consumer data sets for key markets and customers
• Reduce Arconic’s carbon footprint through accurate measurements that enable better decision-making for external scrap procurement