Sustainable Manufacturing: Re-Imagining Production

Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability, Siemens Digital Industries

As the world struggles to reduce carbon emissions and other environmental impacts, it is increasingly clear that goods production must become more sustainable. Given that manufacturing is responsible for 37 percent of global energy consumption, industry is feeling the pressure to address the challenge and there are a few key trends that are accelerating the push to become more sustainable.

Net-zero commitments are forcing businesses to transform their production processes to deliver significant carbon emission reductions. Evolving customer expectations add pressure from the demand side for products with minimal environmental impact. Capital is flowing more readily toward companies employing sustainability goals. And resource scarcity is fueling the transition to circular economies. But this shift also offers a big incentive, as sustainable production is a catalyst for business innovation and growth.

For sustainable production to be a worthwhile investment, it must be put at the heart of the business and address sustainability from all angles. Sustainability improvements suffuse every decision, process, and system making it nearly impossible to create a sustainable business with a bolt-on solution. A business needs to be thinking about how it can create sustainable outcomes from the beginning, visualizing the needed data to make the most informed decisions. While most improvements will fall into these five categories, each business will create a custom solution fitting their requirements:

Decarbonization: reducing CO₂ emissions, internally and externally
Energy efficiency: using less energy for the same outcome
Resource efficiency: optimizing use and re-use of inputs while reducing waste
Circularity: leveraging new materials and methods while extending equipment repairability and upgradeability
People-centricity: building a culture of empowerment, health, and safety.

Innovation, flexibility, and adaptability will be required to drive these categories and to be competitive in future markets. These requirements will invariably overlap in nearly every manufacturing process. Understanding how and when they do will be a key enabler for sustainable manufacturing.

Embedding sustainability into every stage of operations will be critical in accurately reflecting the possible changes needed for sustainable production and it starts at the beginning.

When defining a production strategy, manufacturers need to incorporate cost, schedule, requirements, and sustainability. Line, process, and plant design should be based on holistic sustainability KPIs that are balanced with profitability. Production planning needs to extend from raw materials to end-of-life for an accurate reflection of the KPIs. During operation, production and plant monitoring will provide the deep insights on performance and enable real-time adaptation to meet sustainability targets.

Making these goals and recommendations a reality requires the Digital Enterprise — to seamlessly integrate and digitalize the entire production value chain. Harnessing the power of data for sustainable production relies on combing the real and digital worlds across the value chain, such that intelligent predictions can be made reliably. The comprehensive digital twin provides the collected knowledge from simulations, production data, carbon footprint information, and more for actionable decisions.

When industrial manufacturers invest in digitalization and automation to become a sustainable Digital Enterprise, they can achieve a wide range of important outcomes. With systems in place to collect, analyze, and act on production data — real and digital — a business can analyze their entire operation in the digital twin for different sustainability scenarios. That leads to a more complete understanding and risk mitigation in production by identifying when and where emissions occur across the supply chain.

Businesses can also use the digital twin to achieve huge energy savings with digitalized drive systems and enterprise-wide energy management — reducing energy costs and the associated emissions today. The same can be said for more tangible resources. Water and raw material use can be minimized throughout production by understanding process dynamics more clearly while planning around the unavoidable and expected waste. A global manufacturer may need to understand, plan, and optimize logistics and warehouse operations to minimize their environmental impact.

Into the future, manufacturers will be able to implement digital workflows and training to ensure proper safety in a facility. Teaching new processes and safety procedures will be critical as businesses consider new materials and incorporate new production methods in their sustainability goals.

Our goal is to continue adapting our existing tools to make sustainability a primary decision driver across the development cycle. That means linking data sources across the value chain and feeding that data into the digital twins. But it also entails helping our customers change their perspective on how to think about sustainability, viewing it as an additional outcome from leveraging a digital twin that adds value and drives innovation, rather than a forced requirement.

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