ARC EIF 2023 Review - Sustainability as a Business Strategy

ARC’s European Industry Forum, part of the successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia, has been held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 15 - 17, 2023. The event offered exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies in line with this year’s topic “Managing Industry Evolution in Times of Global Disruption” to its 160 international participants from 20 countries.

Sustainability as a Business Strategy

We all know that sustainability has become one of the buzzwords and one of the key topics in recent years. It is a good sign to see that organizations are taking it seriously and see sustainability as one of their key objectives. Also, the implemented directives/regulations further push industrial companies on their sustainability goals.

Energy Optimisation in Heavy Industry

Florian Zittmayr, Team Lead for Data Science, Wienerberger AG, presented a case story on “Energy Optimisation in Heavy Industry with Data Analytics”. Wienerberger is a provider of smart and sustainable solutions for the entire building envelope, innovative infrastructure solutions as well as one of the world’s largest brickmaker.

Wienerberger turned to AI and IoT analytics from SAS, running SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure Cloud, to help optimize energy costs and achieve its ambitious sustainability goals. By 2023, the company aims to reduce emissions by 15 percent compared to 2020 and be completely climate-neutral by 2050. The company selected a factory in Poland for an initial project, now one of the brickmaker’s best-performing plants and the successful project now serves as a template for expanding the use of AI to other facilities. The collected data from a wide range of sources revealed fluctuations that can lead to inefficiencies and unnecessary energy use. With kilns for firing bricks running at 800 degrees Celsius, the goal is to reduce variability to find ideal, repeatable production steps.

SAS and Wienerberger developed an AI-powered digital twin of the brick production processes that helps explain the fluctuations. It also offers insights into changes that can lower energy use, improve product quality and reduce emissions. By optimizing energy consumption and reducing CO2 emissions through SAS AI and IoT analytics, Wienerberger is turning brick plants into data-driven factories. The aim is to expand the use of advanced analytics in the cloud across 149 facilities in 23 countries

Sustainable Automation

Prabhu Soundarrajan, International Society of Automation (ISA), presented on "Sustainable Automation: Balancing Economic Growth and Environmental Responsibility". Prabhu touched upon the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals framework and gave a brief analysis on the major contributors of global GHG emissions by sectors including agriculture, industry, energy, buildings, and transport and as well as emissions by major countries.

He highlighted the ambition of achieving net zero goals by 2050 and 60GT reduction versus the action gap of 31GT with nationally determined contributions. He emphasized that automation plays a key role for supporting industrial companies and plastics circularity initiatives to achieve sustainability goals. Prabhu closed his presentation issuing “calls to action” for the automation industry as below:

1.            Set reasonable sustainability goals.

2.            Meet the goals short term (2023- 2025) while making progress towards ambitious 2030 net zero goals and forward.

3.            Come together as an automation industry to help achieve sustainability goals with the help of digital transformation.

4.            Leverage symbiotic benefits of sustainability and automation.

5.            Start now with Speed & Scale

The Future of Industrial Operations

Matthias Oppelt, leads a customer driven innovation and development unit for Siemens Digital Industries.  He spoke on “The future of industrial operations – do we all meet in the metaverse?”, stating that the industry is challenged with new trends every day, resulting in challenges which no one will be able to solve on their own.

Looking at climate change and the need for more sustainability, we have to state that the environmental scorecard of industry doesn’t look great, as it is responsible for 20 percent of global CO2 emissions, and accounts for more than a third of global energy consumption.A more sustainable production will require intensified efforts towards a digital transformation of industry, changing the face of future of industrial. Matthias shared aggregated insights from workshops on ‘in-depth future visioning’ with over 80 industrial leading companies and how they see their future operations.

Further, he spoke about strategies and options to make these future operations scenarios become reality and where we are at today. The basis is the digital twin, that Siemens championed very early on, the next step is the Industrial Metaverse, enabling horizontal integration across the entire value chain from design to recycling, everything was siloed, pre-defined processes and steps. This will not be a perfect straight line, but a digital ecosystem.

Matthias touched upon Siemens Xcelerator, a curated, modular portfolio of software and IOT-enabled hardware solutions and services built on standard application programming interfaces, enabling interoperability. Xcelerator creates an open ecosystem that enables co-creation between customers, Siemens, and certified partners.

ARC’s European Industry Forum & Platform 

We like to thank our sponsors, who supported the ARC EIF, and all our  speakers and presenters, who made the event interesting, exciting and memorable. To complement the Forum, ARC Europe offers its online platform accessible 365 days a year. Its goal is to maintain the flow of information, and to foster network opportunities. On the platform you will find information concerning relevant economic developments and information on automation markets, as well as our quarterly industry webinars. 

Materials and presentations from the Forum will be made available on our platform https://arc-industry-forum-europe.arcweb.com/en/ after registration, depending on the package chosen. Forum attendees can download presentation slides, view video recordings and receive further materials on the platform.

For more information, please contact Ann-Kathrin Blech (mailto:ablech@arcweb.com).