Embracing cloud-enabled sustainability in manufacturing

Focus on sustainability

Embrace sustainability management as a part of the core business strategy.

Over the past few decades, we’ve witnessed dramatic shifts in global temperatures and extreme weather conditions. These have not only impacted our environment, but also our society, health, and economies. This is why sustainability management has gained importance. 

While sustainability has been part of corporate strategy for some time now, business leaders have until recently hesitated to incorporate it into the core business strategy as it was seen as not yielding ‘tangible’ results. What has changed for leaders to have embraced sustainability as a business imperative? Let’s look at why and how manufacturing, considered a top polluter accounting for 36% of global emissions, is embracing this change.

Driving value through sustainability

Sustainability – a compliance or business imperative?

Since the industrial age, manufacturers have been innovating and adopting new technologies according to changing market demands. Now, as the manufacturing industry continues to rapidly evolve, keeping sustainability at the core, organizations are driving sustainability imperatives to reduce costs, increase scale, and gain visibility throughout their supply chains. 

Leading manufacturing organizations are taking big steps to reduce carbon emissions across their value chain and, as a result, what was initially perceived as a reporting and compliance exercise has today become an absolute business imperative. One of the most important reasons that has led companies to opt for sustainability is the pressure that governments, regulators, banks, and environmentally conscious consumers have put on them.

Controlling carbon emissions  

How manufacturers can control their carbon emissions. 

Most manufacturing processes contribute directly to one or more of Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions. As manufacturers continue to realize the need to reduce carbon emissions and address sustainability issues, understanding the corporate footprint and different types of emissions will help them achieve their climate change goals:

• Scope 1: owned, non-electrical fleet of vehicles are a few examples that directly contribute to Scope1 emissions. While Scope 1 emissions are unavoidable in most manufacturing processes, manufacturers can look to optimize the performance of equipment they own, thus lowering fuel consumption and thereby the direct impact on Scope1 emissions. 

• Scope 2: indirect emissions arising from the purchase of energy for heating and cooling and lighting. Increased use of air-conditioning, heating, or lighting at a facility such as a large office building, leads to an increased indirect emission as the power utility needs to burn more fossil fuels to generate the energy to meet the increase in demand. It is estimated that both commercial and residential buildings contribute to 17.5% of global GHG emissions. Regulating energy consumption for heating, cooling, and lighting will substantially reduce Scope 2 contribution. 

• Scope 3: Solving Scope 3 carbon measurement requires a value chain–oriented approach because up to 90% of an average organization's resource footprint occurs in the value chain—either upstream (through the supply chain) or downstream (in the product use phase) of its own operations. The problem is that most organizations don't currently have access to the data they need to measure their impact in this space. Without data, they can't know the full impact of each supplier in their supply chain or understand the cost and climate impacts of changing suppliers.