Taking advantage of the business values of sustainability with PTC technology

Taking advantage of the business values of sustainability with PTC technology

Sustainability is a trend that is changing the way we run operations and make business decisions nowadays, with a particular focus on energy management. This week’s presenter on PTC Talks was Rodrigo Alves, Manager Sustainability and Energy Management at Kalypso, who spoke about how European organizations are addressing their sustainability agenda. Through digital technology and PTC platforms, they have been able to uncngover significant business values of sustainability to organizations and help them thrive on their sustainability journey.

Kalypso is a consulting firm established in 2004 and acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2020 as its digital services business arm. It serves a wide range of industries, from life science to consumer, industrial, and high tech, providing, first and foremost, managed consulting services. It helps its clients solve business problems and create strategies for operations predominantly through digital technology. “We bring to the table our industrial expertise and in-depth experience in the deployment and use of digital technologies,” Alves says. “This is from our data science and artificial intelligence capabilities, through to the deployment of digital technology such as the digital twin and digital threads across the whole value chain, from product development to manufacturing to supply chain.”

How to enable the connected enterprise

From a sustainability point of view, what is moving the industry is a second wave of sustainability that is here to stay. If there were doubts about the business value of sustainability in the past, that uncertainty no longer exists. This conviction catalyzes the process of technology investment in every company in every sector. There are numerous drivers of business values for organizations, including improving brand reputation and goodwill, reducing the materials used and energy consumed, allowing entry into increasingly regulated markets, improving company culture and employee engagement, and increasing the top and bottom-line performance from recycling programs.

The sustainability agenda received a strong catalyst over the past year with the global energy crisis we live in. Europe has already experienced a 40 to 45 percent increase in energy costs, which is forecasted to increase even further in the next year. Customers all over Europe are feeling the pain because it is challenging to cope with such inflated energy costs. A small to medium facility in Europe today can spend several million Euros on energy, so increases of between 40 and 45 percent significantly impact operations and profitability. This is driving the sustainability agenda, with companies looking at the energy transition as a solution. This can involve investments in cogeneration and renewables, seeking ways to reduce consumption, updating the energy management system to orchestrate energy data, improving reporting and forecasting, and developing strategies to achieve net zero targets. Because as you reduce your energy consumption, energy costs are reduced along with your environmental impact.

Can the digital thread boost sustainability?

Kalypso, deliver digital technologies through what it calls the digital thread. The digital thread is the idea of establishing a seamless flow of data and processes that connect the whole value chain, from R&D product development to manufacturing, inbound and outbound logistics, all the way to products reaching the final consumer and ensuring the longevity of their product. The digital thread can deliver numerous value propositions, such as breaking through data silos, reducing iterations between departments, and bringing products faster to market.

But from a sustainability standpoint, it can also be a pillar to power the capability to improve environmental performance. Operating sustainably depends on understanding your environmental impact; companies must also report this for greenhouse gas protocols. That entails calculating the greenhouse gas footprint across the value chain. Kalypso delivers this information through a digital thread to create a traceable and transparent view of your environmental impact across the value chain.

The main point here is to have traceability and the ability to reduce environmental impact. This could be achieved by using PLM to facilitate eco-design practices, develop products that substitute raw materials, enable upfront consideration of the production process, deliver a lifecycle assessment of the product, and address better ways to reduce carbon footprints from earlier stages of the process. Regarding production, being very focused on orchestrating the energy data, enabling energy efficiency projects, dispatching energy more accurately and more effectively, and overall reducing outage losses.

What is an Energy Management Maturity Model?

Kalypso’s initial approach is to place each client along the Energy Management Maturity Model. This model positions each client from the lowest level of disparate, through connected, intelligent right through to the aspirational class of world-class.

Organizations may not have a specific energy management strategy or policy at a disparate level and will have siloed data sources. They will practice much of their energy management processes manually, such as Excel, and cannot forecast to confront utility bills promptly. The aim is to move these clients up to a connected status where you are integrating IT and OT systems, establishing dashboards, defining energy management KPIs and an energy baseline, starting to use alerts, and utilizing ways to anticipate problems using analytics to identify the best opportunities for energy conservation measures.

The next step is intelligent status; even more ambitious targets are set. Organizations will have centralized dashboards and energy management procedures and policies all over the site and start to use predictive and prescriptive analytics to identify further energy conservation measures. Then finally, it is a matter of guiding them to world-class where they lead the way to achieve carbon neutrality and set industry standards, leverage AI and machine learning with closed-loop control to improve processes and energy efficiency autonomously.

Whatever stage the organization is on its journey through PTC software, Kalypso can guide them on this journey to achieve world-class through the use of Kalypso’s Sustainability and Energy Management (SIM) system. First of all, through the use of digital technology, being able to converge the old data, seamlessly incorporate information and data from energy meters, production data from the MES system and ERP systems, and other data APIs such as weather and utility through Kepware and ThingWorx. The IoT platform facilitates a robust methodology to create energy monitoring dashboards and management capabilities, identify optimization opportunities, track the return of investments of your initiatives on energy savings, and perform sustainability and carbon footprint monitoring.