Sustainability has become an important topic of focus for industrial decision makers, driven by more stringent demands from policymakers and greater awareness of the environmental impact of carbon emissions from their customers. As getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 becomes the North Star across industries, approaches for achieving this ambitious target vary greatly. Some businesses have taken a reactive stance, doing what they need to in order to meet compliance standards. Others have been more proactive, taking the initiative to change the way their business operates with improving sustainability just one of several transformation objectives.
In the industrial sector, those in the latter category are realising that their sustainability goals are inextricably linked to their vision of operating a more efficient business model. They’re spotting opportunities for better efficiency across their operations and are getting on the front-foot in maximising their outputs and making the most from their existing resources. Where efficiency leads, greater sustainabilitynaturally follows.
Doing More With Less
Efficiency is about getting the most out of what you have. It’s maximising the value of the organisation’s investment in people and resources in order to deliver better outcomes for stakeholders. For today’s manufacturers, being efficient requires an end-to-end control of processes to make best use of available inputs, arriving at faster and more cost–effective product delivery.
Leaders should look at efficiency and sustainability as mutually beneficial goals. Improving the efficiency of operations reduces waste, which improves the sustainability of processes. This introduces cost benefits, the additional revenues from which can then be reinvested in further improving efficiencies. The end result is a positive feedback loop that continually makes processes leaner and more effective, helping lower emitted carbon over time.
Even better, the benefits of efficiency tend to be exponential. Small efficiency gainsin a single line or site can be replicated over more processes to produce a significantenvironmental impact over time.
5 Keys to Tying Together Efficiency and Sustainability Objectives
While industry leaders may fear that going green means massive disruption to existing operations, in practice many of the benefits can be realised by tackling existing inefficiencies and issues. There are five main ways in which pursuing efficiency gains can produce better sustainability outcomes.
Industrial environments are home to vast quantities of data, yet manufacturers have struggled to generate sufficient value from their assets. Common challenges range from applying sensors in hard-to-reach or rugged environments through to cleaning and standardising unstructured data from various sources. In all, only around a quarter of the data available to industrial decision makers is effectively analysed.
Analytics, however, is the path to greater efficiency. Better visibility over machine health, performance and outputs provides more control over which areas can be improved. These improvements bring greater efficiency, which breeds energy savings and a lower carbon footprint. It’s only by knowing where the centres of waste exist that you can put in place the domino effect of massive efficiency and sustainability benefits.
One of the major sources of waste and inefficiency in industrial environments is unplanned downtime. A fault at some part in the process can bring everything to a halt with widespread repercussions in terms of wasted resources.
With connected plant operations, manufacturers can see in real-time how things are working and use predictive modelling to anticipate potential risks and bottlenecks. For example, by connecting with OEMs, the operator may gain early indications that machine parts need replacing, which can then be done before the defect causes a larger shutdown.
Taking a preventive maintenance approach means you don’t have to stop production, which keeps the plant running efficiently and reduces the risk of unnecessary waste, such as unproductive machines or equipment being left running.
Large-scale manufacturing is by nature resource intensive. This issue is exacerbated where the production processes are not effective, which can compound waste levels. For example, in the food and beverage industry, the high cleanliness standards expected by customers can push manufacturers to the extreme in purifying produce, which when carried out inefficienctly has implications for massive water waste.
Intelligent automation tools can play an important role in counteracting wasteful practices. Using technologies such as Digital Twins, leaders can better design and improve processes in order to identify potential inefficiencies and take remedial measures before they’re rolled out.
There are certain ‘costs’ that have historically been accepted in industrial environments as they were viewed as unavoidable. Carbon emissions in heavy industries, such as metals and oil and gas, are a notable example. Leaders are now realising that by addressing these issues directly, they can score a double win – reduce carbon waste and recycle it into something useful.
The first step here is measurement of carbon emissions. By assigning values to materials, the carbon footprint can be quantified and benchmarked. To do this we use analytics software tools and emission modeling such as PEMS (or Software CEMS) to complement standard physical analysers (CEMS), which combined help to lower maintenance and improve measurement. With access to these sensor-based analytics, line managers and operators are able to identify where assets are performing below required standards. It’s at this point that strategies can be installed to improve performance and address the causes of inefficiencies.
In the case of heavy industries, there are opportunities to identify the areas that are contributing most to carbon emissions and apply CCUS practices to capture waste and avoid it entering the atmosphere.
For example, in Europe, we are working with steelmaker ArcelorMittal and biotech company LanzaTech on a project where the carbon output of blast furnaces is recycled into a more sustainable ethanol product called Steelanol. Creative solutions to deep-seated problems like these can produce more efficient and circularprocesses with massive environmental benefits.
If sustainability is seen as a secondary priority, it will almost always be discarded in difficult circumstances. The regulatory environment is helping to reinforce the fact that sustainable practices are an organisational obligation and plant managers today are increasingly bound legally to lower emissions. Moreover, their customers now want to see evidence that efforts are being made across the supply chain to lower emissions.
The best way to make processes sustainable is to make sustainability part of the process. This means installing parameters and alarms to control processes, alerting personnel to high carbon levels or even automatically reducing loads where set limits are exceeded. Such precautions offer efficiency benefits while keeping sustainability practices in check.
Getting to Net-Zero
On paper, this all seems simple and logical but, as we know, it can be difficult to make these changes in practice. We often see leaders introduce efficiency measures to a particular area, only to stop if they don’t see immediate results. The benefits can be gradual and so it needs a broad time horizon. It also needs a commitment to trialling different business cases – if you find a model that works, use that as a blueprint for applying to different parts of your operations and scaling based on positive proof of concept.
The goal for industrial leaders is to be proactive in looking for efficiencies across all areas of business and manufacturing operations. Starting from the lens of improving what you’re already doing through efficiency strategies will help to kickstart the virtuous cycle of more effective processes leading to lower waste, leading to better cost margins. This ultimately means more capital to reinvest for further process improvements and efficiencies. The cycle has a direct impact on ROI and a positive outcome for the company’s carbon footprint, something that benefits all stakeholders.
If you want to learn more about sustainability and efficient processes, visit the Management Perspectives hub.
Author: Sebastien Grau, Regional Vice-President Middle East, Turkey & Africa at Rockwell Automation
