FDES in 2026: why have lead times become a business risk?
If you have been working on FDES or LCAs for a few years, you have probably felt it: everything is speeding up.
More requests, more pressure, more requirements… but still the same time and resource constraints.
The reason is fairly simple: in 2026, not having an FDES available at the right time can be enough to lose a contract. Lead times are no longer a technical issue, but a real business risk for manufacturers.
Creating an FDES relies on several successive steps, each of which can become a pressure point:
Obtaining your FDES quickly has become a condition for market access.
In many calls for tenders, the FDES is requested very early on, and when it is not available, your product is not even considered.
Today, the challenge is no longer just to produce a compliant FDES; it is also about managing to have it at the right time:
- The FDES has become a prerequisite for bidding in tenders.
- It dictates market access, even before any technical or financial comparison is made.
- The lead time for availability is now part of the equation.
When you take a close look at the FDES creation process, it quickly becomes clear that the issue is not any single step, but the cumulative workload throughout the journey — and you may face one or more challenges:
Problem #1: you don’t have an in-house LCA team
First reality: not everyone has in-house resources.
LCA is a profession in its own right, requiring time, specific skills, and a thorough understanding of methodological and regulatory frameworks:
- You don’t have a dedicated LCA team
- Recruiting is time-consuming and costly
- Upskilling takes even more time
Result: the production of your FDES is fully handled by an external consultancy.
Problem #2: even with an internal team, your lead times remain long
Second reality: having an LCA team doesn’t solve everything.
In practice, your teams have to manage many tasks in parallel:
- New FDES
- Updates
- Urgent requests from the sales teams
- Arbitrages permanents
Priorities shift rapidly, spikes in workload are difficult to manage, and lead times soon begin to lengthen.
Result: you rely on external consultancies for the production of your FDES.
Problem #3: outsourcing does not always guarantee speed
When internal resources are no longer enough, you often have no choice:
you turn to external consultancies to produce your FDES.
But in reality, it’s not a magic solution.
LCA consultancies are under pressure too:
- Strong rise in demand
- Tightening deadlines
There is another reality, less visible but very real.
With the surge in demand, the maturity and experience of the LCA partner clearly make a difference, both in terms of lead times and the quality of the FDES produced.
Result: the time you thought you would save initially can be lost later, with a direct impact on your projects and deadlines.
Problem #4: verification becomes your final bottleneck
Even when your FDES is produced, the process is not over.
Before it can be used, it must be verified.
And it is often at this stage that your lead times stretch even further, for two distinct reasons.
Risk #1: availability of verifiers
The first risk comes from the capacity of the INIES verification system:
- The number of FDES to be verified is increasing sharply
- The number of verifiers is increasing as well
- But the two are not evolving at the same pace
Result: the bottleneck shifts, it is no longer only in FDES production, but also in verification.
Even with a well-prepared FDES, the lead time partly depends on the availability of INIES verifiers, a factor over which you have little control.
Risk #2: the quality of FDES produced
The second risk is often even more detrimental.
The verifiers are there to check, not to correct, complete or even train the person producing your FDES.
When your FDES goes in for verification with:
- weak assumptions
- inconsistent data
- a poorly understood methodological framework
In reality, this means:
- additional questions from the INIES verifier
- requests for justification
- necessary corrections on the production side
- multiple back-and-forth exchanges between the verifier and the producer
Result: very quickly, a verification that was initially supposed to take just a few rounds stretches out, and lead times start to drift.
Towards a new way of producing FDES
Today, this model has reached its limits :
- Going faster by putting more pressure on internal teams is not a sustainable solution
- Relying solely on outsourcing does not always ensure lead times are met
- Verification will always remain a mandatory step, no matter what.
In other words, the problem is not just speed, but how FDES are produced.
When we look in detail at the various steps, from carrying out the LCA to publishing in the INIES database, we see the same difficulties recurring consistently:
- many manual tasks
- repeated calculations
- a heavy reliance on scarce profiles
- bottlenecks throughout the process
It is precisely to address these limitations that FDES configurators have emerged.
Not as a magic solution, but as a different way of organising FDES production.
By structuring data, assumptions and calculation rules upstream, they enable a deep transformation of key steps in the process, reducing human workload and securing lead times, without compromising on quality.
Configurators are designed around the product, making them accessible to anyone in the company who knows the product.
What FDES configurators concretely change
In practice, FDES configurators do not remove regulatory requirements or the need for verification; however, they allow effort to be focused in the right place.
- Calculations are secured upstream
- Methodological rules are integrated once, then reused
- Verification will always remain a mandatory step, no matter what.
- Product data is structured to be consistent, traceable, and immediately usable.
Result: EPDs are produced more quickly, with more consistent quality, and reach verification in much better conditions.
It is not a promise to “always go faster”, but to avoid unnecessary time losses,
and to restore clarity on timelines.
The WeLOOP approach
It is in this spirit that WeLOOP supports manufacturers in implementing EPD configurators, designed from the outset to:
- structure product data
- ensure LCA calculation rules are secure
- facilitate INIES verification
- make deadlines more reliable in a context of strong market pressure
Each configurator is designed in close collaboration with the product teams and regulatory requirements, in order to remain aligned with the company's actual practices.