Digital Agility for a Sustainable Future

Written by Lisa Johnston, Chief Marketing Officer, AVEVA

In the past year, humanity has faced a challenge that’s been unique in history in its scale and scope. Industries have been affected in many ways. At AVEVA, we’re really proud to be supporting the essential front-line teams who are responding to COVID-19 and working day and night to improve global supply chains, at companies ranging from pharma firms GlaxoSmithKline and Genentech, to food and beverage producers like Starbucks, or municipalities like the City of Seattle and Gwinnett County Water.

Building back for a sustainable future

Now, as the world looks to rebuild, we have a unique opportunity ahead of us. Digital technologies are already helping to cut carbon emissions by up to fifteen per cent, in energy, manufacturing, agriculture, buildings, services, and transportation. The World Economic Forum estimates that technology can help meet seventy percent of the targets underpinning the United Nations Sustainability Goals. That’s a huge opportunity, one that’s particularly relevant to manufacturing. The next ten years will be critical to our success in tackling climate change through the sustainable development goals – it’s been named the Decade of Action.

At AVEVA, we recognize the core role that technology can play – and we take our responsibility seriously. We’re extending our capabilities to offer our customers real solutions. Because when it comes to sustainability, our biggest opportunity is what we call our handprint – how our software can enable and drive sustainability for industries.

The scope and scale of our opportunity

To understand the scope and scale of how technology can drive sustainability, let’s look at Henkel, a chemical and consumer goods company headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany. To support Henkel’s sustainability commitment, and meet their customers’ demand, they’ve built a digital backbone that connects their global operations using AVEVA software in the Cloud. There are 3,500 sensors in each site which provide 1.5 billion data points to optimize asset performance. So far, they’ve cut their environmental footprint by one third, using less energy, less water and producing less waste. The saving is growing 16% every year.

Henkel is just one example. Alongside the innovative baristas at Starbucks, we co-developed an industry-leading manufacturing execution system that spans their edge to enterprise. Using a customized operations management interface, Starbucks’ leadership team can have greater insight on their coffee roasting plant operations, with integrated analytics that help drive higher quality, consistency and traceability across their global operations. This enables the entire roastery team to benefit from “Shop floor to top floor” visibility of all production and inventory data. As a result, operational efficiency is higher and Starbucks can be confident that its coffee blends are perfect, to the final sip.

Boosting efficiency, driving sustainability, enabling collaboration

These examples offer lessons beyond the manufacturing sector. After the past twelve months, many industries are reviewing the social and governance implications of new stimulus driving the economic recovery. Our solutions can enable diverse sectors to boost efficiency, sustainability and connect teams in real time to drive value.

At AVEVA, we’re committed to measuring and reporting on our own environmental stewardship efforts for our operations too. We recently joined Schneider Electric and many of our customers and partners as signatories of the United Nations Global Compact and we have also invested in membership of BSR. These are all vital steps along the road to recovery, innovation and building back better.

We have all had to pivot quickly to evolve our businesses in the past year. The coming twelve months will test our ingenuity again, as systems put in place in times of crisis are normalized to set new operating benchmarks.

We are proud to have built trusted relationships with customers across the world. As we look to the new year, we’re committed to lead in sustainable innovation, to drive ever-more-efficient performance for companies worldwide.