Area of action: Product stewardship

Increasing the quality and lifetime, minimizing the environmental impact

For us, product stewardship means taking responsibility for the impact of our products throughout the product life cycle, from their development to the end of their lifetime. Our aim is to meet our customers’ highest quality requirements and provide them with products with a long lifetime. The certification of our production sites in accordance with ISO 9001 is therefore a matter of course for us.

Sustainable product life cycle

It is important to us to know what effects our products have on the environment so that we can derive measures on this basis and improve product sustainability. Life cycle assessments for representative product categories help us identify the factors that influence the sustainable product life cycle.

High quality and long lifetime

Continuous reduction of wearing parts and efficient maintenance routines make a positive contribution to SMA inverters’ lifetime. We qualify components that are critical to the product’s lifetime separately before their use.

In addition, we conduct extensive functional and endurance tests during the development phase. Before series production, SMA devices undergo field tests in our own and in selected customer installations. One important key figure for the quality of our products is their field failure rate. This key quality figure refers to the number of failures in the field after the products are approved. For each SMA product, ambitious and specific product lifetime and field failure rate targets are defined and assessed each year. In 2023, we achieved our 2025 goal of reducing the field failure rate of our products to 1.0% (monthly rolling key figure; ratio of field failures over the past two years to the number of units shipped over the past two years).

Sustainable product development

Our top priority in product development is to consider the overall system across the sectors of electricity, HVAC and e-mobility. Our focus is on highly integrated and digitalized solutions that cover as many functions as possible and thus meet the demands for sustainability, material efficiency and ease of use. Our guidelines for sustainable product design set out key design criteria that have a positive impact on the sustainability performance of our products.