# Thomas Palm

Thomas Palm writes about product compliance and sustainability in manufacturing, especially how suppliers can provide product-level carbon-footprint data and use shared product information to guide reporting, sourcing, and design decisions.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/thomas-palm/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tpalm
- Topics: supply-chain, supply-chain-resilience, scope-3-emissions
- Based on 16 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Thomas Palm is useful for explaining supplier product data for carbon footprints, compliance, and sourcing decisions.

- Best for: A supplier-facing software vendor in product carbon, compliance, or product data management.
- Not for: Consumer sustainability campaigns or neutral comparisons of competing compliance software vendors.
- Check first: Confirm audience composition, post performance, and booking process before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Carbon footprints should be built from suppliers' own data, not estimates.
- Voluntary supplier requests quickly become mandatory.
- Compliance and sustainability are the same data problem sitting on different floors.

## Main ideas

- **Carbon footprints should be built from suppliers' own data, not estimates**: Thomas Palm argues that top-down, spend-based carbon numbers only give a company a sense of its impact, while primary supplier data lets it manage that impact. Because most of a vehicle's footprint accrues before assembly — which they put at 70 to 90 percent, across materials, components, and deliveries — OEMs with net-zero commitments have to collect granular, bottom-up figures from their suppliers rather than model them centrally. In their telling, the conditions that make this workable are standardization and low friction: a Catena-X certified tool means a supplier calculates once and hands the same figure to any OEM, requires no lifecycle-assessment specialist, and runs as standard software rather than an IT project.
- **Voluntary supplier requests quickly become mandatory**: Palm addresses the objection directly: suppliers are busy, and waiting to see whether a data request sticks is understandable. They say they have seen this pattern before in the industry — requirements start as pilots or voluntary asks and then become compulsory, at which point a supplier that cannot supply the data risks no longer being considered a supplier at all. They add a second pressure: the supplier is accountable for the accuracy of the numbers it submits, which is the argument for a certified, standardized calculation method rather than a one-off spreadsheet.
- **Compliance and sustainability are the same data problem sitting on different floors**: Palm's recurring organizational observation is that compliance teams — with chemistry expertise, material declarations, and IMDS submissions — and sustainability teams — reporting to auditors and banks alongside the finance function — work from the same material, supplier, and product data without realizing it. As reporting grows, that separation produces two versions of the same facts, reconciled by hand whenever a material or a regulation changes, and breaks once a company moves past one product and one spreadsheet. Their answer is one shared data core with one governance logic, generating whichever output is required — IMDS, Catena-X, CSRD, digital product passports, or internal KPIs — from the same source.
- **Manage impact instead of measuring last year's**: Palm frames the shift as a change in the question a company asks: from 'are we compliant?' and retrospective reporting to 'how do we build a better product?' The contrasts are explicit — not retrospective reporting but forward-looking decisions; not outsourcing expertise to a consultant who fills in forms but builds no internal capability; not siloed teams but a shared foundation that compliance, sustainability, procurement, and product teams can all use. The stated payoff is the ability to test changes at the material and substance level, then act on sourcing, material choice, and geography to change energy and transport impacts.
- **Product data is a business-risk question, not only a compliance one**: One post widens the argument beyond carbon and regulation. The automotive companies Palm talks to worry less about fines than about being unable to answer basic questions about their own products. Tariffs and supply-chain resilience make it important to know how much of a critical metal or material a product contains and where it originated: an unknown origin can mean the whole product is taxed, and costs escalate quickly. Palm's answer is to model the product at substance level during design, so environmental regulation, supply-chain resilience, and geopolitical requirements can be weighed against each other.

## Work to read

- [Ford’s Kuga line: the first car calculated on 100% primary supplier data](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tpalm_ford-motor-company-decided-to-make-the-kuga-activity-7447961668153962496-90-K)
- [Compliance and sustainability teams using the same data without knowing it](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tpalm_one-of-the-things-i-find-fascinating-about-activity-7442540944974966784-SXw9)
- [Substance-level product models as a business-risk tool, not just a reporting tool](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tpalm_the-leading-companies-in-automotive-i-talk-activity-7480561428865638401-sVyb)
- [From proving last year’s footprint to steering next year’s product](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tpalm_one-of-the-biggest-problems-in-manufacturing-activity-7439641787947892736-V8cc)

## Brand relationships

- **IPOINT** (employment)
- **Ford Motor Company** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Catena-X** (mention)
- **IMDS** (mention)

## Partnerships

No published sponsorship policy, media kit, rate card, or partnership inquiry route appears in the posts, so ask for the booking process before proceeding. Thomas Palm writes as part of the iPoint team; one post refers to the company as Assent, formerly IPOINT. They promote iPoint's Product Sustainability Core and Impact Intelligence software to automotive suppliers and OEMs. The Ford Kuga posts spell out the vendor arrangement in unusual detail: a Catena-X certified calculation method, a standard SaaS tool that needs no LCA expertise and no IT implementation, and six months free to participating Ford suppliers. For a manufacturing software company considering a thought-leadership partnership, these posts show the ground they can cover with authority: material-level product compliance and carbon-footprint data. Any co-created asset would sit close to the employer's product narrative, so agree on that fit in advance.

## Alternatives

- Angelika Steinbrecher: Choose Steinbrecher when the campaign needs to get into the calculations, not the OEM story around them. Their posts examine two obligations converging on automotive suppliers — the battery passport, with its product carbon footprint, and the wider Catena-X and IMDS push for primary PCF data — and distinguish them by scope: Catena-X covers cradle-to-gate across the whole automotive supply chain, while the battery regulation adds end-of-life phases and requires primary data for production and placing on the market. They also spell out what suppliers must do when things change: recalculate a portfolio after a material or site energy-mix change, a move in production to another country, or a change of supplier, and report through more than one channel because no consolidation is coming soon. A second strand explores taking routine material questions off compliance specialists by letting other stakeholders query composition data with LLMs, including a PFAS analysis across own and purchased parts and a check of where rare earth metals sit. If the webinar aims to help suppliers understand scope and verification differences and leave knowing what to recalculate and when, this is the closer match.
- Jaime Martin Ko Atilano: Choose Atilano when the target reader is a sustainability or finance leader inside a large enterprise, rather than a tier-one or tier-two supplier, and the campaign wants to argue that carbon and financial data belong in the same system. Their posts describe an SAP sustainability role working with CSRD, EU Taxonomy, Omnibus, GHG Protocol and ISSB/IFRS, plus a Climate Week workshop on closing the gap between footprint measurement and execution by mapping financial, operational and carbon impact together through ERP data. If the webinar promises that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and targets corporate buyers evaluating sustainability software at platform level, this framing fits their decision better than a supplier-level parts discussion.
- Valentina Rappa: Rappa is the right alternative when the campaign focuses on accounting rules. Their posts argue that the GHG Protocol does not yet reward reuse, repair and refurbishment: manufacturing emissions go entirely to the first owner, even when a product is refurbished or resold. They cover the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's proposal to amortize those emissions across a product's expected lifetime so multiple owners share them. They also map the 2025 EU pipeline — the Circular Economy Act, ESPR and Digital Product Passports, and CSRD's first disclosures of circular economy performance — and connect it to work at Rheaply helping companies run reuse events and measure embodied carbon. Choose this for sustainability teams in advanced manufacturing or the built environment when the message is that reporting structures, not intentions, determine whether circularity gets adopted.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/