Moving towards carbon‑neutrality is one of the most challenging and important goals for the coming years. Regulatory frameworks are in place to guide the industry along the path and life cycle assessment (LCA) has been established as one of the most common methodologies for quantifying sustainability. To do this, principles are provided in standards as EN ISO 14040/44 and specific rulebooks have been developed to describe the assessment in more detail (Catena-X, 2023).

An LCA is a systematic analysis of environmental impacts over the course of the entire life cycle of a product. It typically includes the different stages ranging from raw material extraction and processing over manufacturing, logistics, and distribution until the use phase and end‑of‑life (cradle‑to‑grave). Focusing on the contribution to global warming potential (GWP) the sum of greenhouse gas emissions is estimated as CO₂eq in a product carbon footprint (PCF). Correlated to these stages, the carbon emissions are reported in different scopes: direct and indirect emissions within the own production (scope 1 and 2) as well as indirect, upstream and downstream emissions, outside the direct control of the company (scope 3).

Conducting PCFs for a broad product portfolio is not feasible using a typical commercial software which demands for high manual efforts. Describing the several stages is time consuming as it involves extracting and evaluating all the required input data from numerous internal and external data sources. Especially for scope 3, which is usually the dominating contributor to the entire PCF, the data acquisition can be very challenging, depending on the supplier base, variety of purchased parts or materials as well as data quality and availability.

To overcome these challenges, a standardized and automated process following a data‑driven approach is crucial to rapidly generating PCFs, providing a robust database for further strategic planning. To achieve a holistic description of the product‑related CO₂eq on a material as well as on a part level, information from different sources must be linked to ensure data quality and reliable results. Therefore, it is essential to...