What is Digital and Sustainable Manufacturing?
Digitization enables companies to embed sustainability into their industrial systems and optimize operational results to achieve the greenest scenario at the lowest cost. IIoT can be used to collect high-precision industrial data and enable remote collaboration by running operational processes outside the cloud. Overlaying AI models on these digital representations of the enterprise can help determine where the new adjustments can have the greatest impact.
Digital transformation in manufacturing is the application of technology to maximize revenue streams, reduce costs, improve the manufacturing quality, and increase flexibility. Use cases range from optimizing assets to improving productivity to speed towards industrialization.
Why is TWIN Transformation of Manufacturing so important?
Most manufacturing companies are aware of the need to digitally transform, and they understand that the changes will be significant. The following three areas of focus are the most important for meeting sustainability goals:
1. Production processes
To make manufacturing more sustainable producers must save energy, reduce waste and increase visibility.
2. Workforce training
Manufacturers can use digital sharing tools to support and improve sustainable practices and smarter actions to reduce knowledge losses as skilled workers retire.
3. Supply chain
A more efficient supply chain helps reduce our carbon footprint by saving energy, reducing the need for warehouses and optimizing logistics.
Sustainability in manufacturing is built upon a foundation of data
One of the often-overlooked benefits of using technology to accelerate change is improved sustainability.
Manufacturers that have engaged in digital transformation efforts understand that data will play a significant role in addressing the sustainability problem. In reality, data analytics, with a major focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), is the most crucial technology for managing sustainability.
Organizations now have unprecedented amounts of data at their disposal, but extracting insights from that data quickly and efficiently needs digitalization. Digital technologies can turn data into operational benefits and enhanced efficiencies are critical to enable quantum improvements in sustainable manufacturing sustainability.
Five Success Factors Driving Sustainable Manufacturing With Digital Transformation
1. Establish a foundation for compliance
The first step in environmental digital transformation is to build a solid basis for compliance data. Centralizing company data helps to enhance how compliance information is managed and accessible; when firms have a single point of control and visibility, they can successfully simplify compliance.
Consolidating your data in the form of cloud-based software and laying a solid basis for compliance information reduces the chance of reporting errors, such as inaccuracies and incompleteness, and establishes a single source of truth. Since your business manages this information centrally, you may transmit it to all relevant regulatory databases at the state or federal level for compliance reporting. The digital system acts as the compliance framework, allowing you to create effective sustainable practices on a solid base.
2. Establish data monitoring
3. Build a Transparent Supply Chain
Supply chain leaders want visibility in order to achieve sustainability goals when digitizing. It is extremely difficult to follow things from development to delivery in a regulated manner if they lack openness and data exchange with their suppliers. This makes identifying supplier risk, protecting the brand, and reporting compliance concerns more difficult in the future.
Visibility is usually improved in today's digital environment by adopting supply chain technology, which gives data regarding shipping logistics, manufacturing statuses, and supply chain processes. The data generated by this technology assists businesses in improving their efficiency by predicting inventory shortages, eliminating process bottlenecks, achieving standard requirements, and tracing items through the delivery stage. Furthermore, this technology assists companies in avoiding outdated and unsold inventory, lowering carbon emissions from logistical activities, optimizing fulfillment decision-making, and minimizing waste across raw material inventories. Visibility enables companies to identify and correct inefficiencies across the supply chain, allowing them to immediately decrease costs and work toward their sustainability goals.
4. Automate notifications and important updates
Keeping up with system and business upgrades is a critical aspect of maintaining sustainable compliance. Corporate, personnel, and regulatory information about facilities is always changing. As a result, it's critical to build up an automatic notification system to keep your team up to date on the newest document, workflow, and data changes.
Assume that a SOP is revised for safety reasons. An automated method might generate an alert that this modification has been made, minimizing the amount of propagated mistakes for compliance reporting. Automation also relieves staff of the need to do several processes to update information and decreases the chance of human mistake.
5. Unify your processes
The final phase is included into the digitalization process. The ultimate objective of digital transformation is to integrate all of an organization's activities and procedures. After adopting environmental digital transformation in one area of business, a corporation may extend into other areas, providing the groundwork for further digitalization.
This method enables businesses and compliance teams to turn their environmental compliance program across several domains into an auditable and continuous process. Most significantly, this strategy maintains accuracy and reduces the risk of noncompliance across the whole compliance data management process.
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The Business Transformers
Four Areas of Impact on how how manufacturing can be sustainable-and sustainability can be manufacturable
1. Product Design
- Decisions made during the product design stage can account for up to 80% of a product's lifetime emissions.
- Companies can make the proper decisions by drawing on established cost-optimization approaches and integrating greenhouse gas emissions in the simulation and trade-offs.
- Additionally, labor and energy expenses have grown, as have raw material costs. A stronger emphasis on MRO and alternative sustainable materials is critical to meeting targets.
2. Lifecycle Packaging
- Eco-friendly packaging has moved from the "buzz" to the "regular." Driven by the pandemic and ever-increasing restrictions, the need to reimagine ways of working, as well as increased public awareness, have prompted manufacturers to take rapid action and make big pledges.
- Breakthrough creative concepts - from biodegradable or compostable to bioplastics - promote continuous advances and leading trends. The ever-popular reduce-reuse-recycle strategy, on the other hand, is here to stay.
3. Carbon Footprint
- The next significant opportunity for manufacturing are to go net-zero and circular. Utilizing sustainable and innovative solutions to run industries, such as renewable electrical supplies or green hydrogen, will become the new normal.
- Energy management should be seen as an essential component of any decarbonization effort. Excellent energy management performance is not just a regulatory need or a proactive commitment, but it also makes good commercial sense in order to build long-term value.
4. Operational Excellence
- For decades, investments in operational excellence projects to increase operational efficiency and eliminate waste have been a priority.
- Nevertheless, companies are challenging to achieve breakthrough or long-term sustainable results.
- By integrating operational excellence principles with a focus on sustainability, organizations can drive positive change, reduce environmental impact, and achieve long-term sustainability goals while enhancing operational efficiency and effectiveness.
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