Industrial eco-design: reduce your costs and your carbon footprint

Reducing the costs and environmental impact of your metal parts production is an industrial opportunity offered by the Hexalean Group. How? By designing differently. Drawing on its industry expertise, our engineering department supports you in an industrial eco-design process to rethink your products—whether from the initial specifications or based on existing designs—and optimize processes. This approach to improving your industrialization allows you to strengthen your competitiveness while helping you meet your decarbonization commitments.

Our engineering department can get involved as early as the specification phase to guide design choices toward solutions that are not only more cost-effective but also more sustainable.

We encourage the use of more environmentally friendly raw materials, such as various grades of low-carbon steel (SSAB Zero™, XCarb®, etc.). This material delivers functional performance that meets the high standards expected. However, it is produced using electric arc furnaces powered by recycled and renewable energy sources.

Working closely with your teams, Hexalean Group’s engineering experts focus on optimizing your existing products. They analyze the current design to identify areas for improvement (material substitution, structural lightweighting, etc.) and propose an optimized redesign.

This results in reduced production costs and associated emissions, without compromising on performance or lifespan.

Based on an in-depth functional analysis, we tailor the design to the bare essentials to offer you a solution that is optimized in terms of both cost and environmental impact while meeting your requirements.

From the very start of the project, we identify the key areas for reducing costs and your industry’s carbon footprint.

This key step helps highlight concrete opportunities to optimize both the design of your parts and your production processes.

The Hexalean Group organizes workshops that bring your teams and our engineers together with a shared goal: to design with precision by combining your knowledge of product functionality with our expertise in manufacturing processes (cutting, forming, machining, etc.).

Together, we define the criteria (using the right amount of material, the right level of welding, etc.) to achieve an optimal cost-to-functionality ratio.

Once the design phase (eco-design or redesign) is complete, our industrial group puts its responsiveness at your service.

You’ll quickly receive a prototype to validate technical and functional choices before production begins.

We provide you with detailed, well-organized documents: summaries of recommendations, estimates of costs and carbon savings, and more…

You’ll have a clear vision to guide your strategic decision-making.

• Significant reduction in production costs through eco-design or redesign, a design-to-cost approach, and Industry 4.0

• Use of low-carbon materials, manufacturing processes optimized to reduce waste…
• A 90% reduction in industrial carbon emissions was achieved for a client in the military sector through the use of green steel produced in electric furnaces.

• Advanced technologies: predictive algorithms, IoT sensors…
• Monitoring and reducing energy consumption and costs…

• Close collaboration with your teams from the very beginning of the project
• Local presence with national or even international reach: geographic and operational proximity…
• Efficient supply chain management: reduced transportation (just-in-time delivery, etc.), lower emissions…

For many years, the Hexalean Group has been actively committed to continuously improving its energy efficiency¹.

Here are a few examples of the actions taken and results achieved:

• 100% of metal scraps recycled by a specialized contractor
• 20% reduction in gas consumption thanks to the replacement of a heat exchanger
• Replacement of 5 laser cutting centers with more energy-efficient fiber technologies
• ISO 14001 certification (environmental management) obtained in 2024 for our company PPC Industrie, with plans to roll it out to the group’s other sites.

1. Source: 2024 CSR Report