We recently connected with a panel of experts for the webinar “Make Sustainability Profitable & Turn Your Net-Zero Goals Into Revenue Boosters.” Here we spotlight that presentation with a chat about the real benefits and challenges related to sustainable manufacturing. Take a look…
Smart Industry: Is sustainable manufacturing as complicated as many fear it to be? What's a solution to overcome that perception?
Peter Harding, founder & CEO, Kelvin: The idea that more efficiency leads to fewer emissions is not complicated. You find the problem and fix it. The complexity comes in doing this while delivering continued productivity and profits. The solution to achieving this balance of sustainability goals and production gains is leveraging automation and machine learning to find inefficiencies, deliver collaborative control, and utilize expertise to fix the problems.
Chris Klosterman, founder & CEO, K-IIOT: It is not complicated. However, it can be challenging. Foundational elements of sustainable manufacturing include a fundamental understanding of your assets and how they can lose their function. Cultural change is necessary to overcome any perception.
Suhail Jiwani, CTO, Kelvin: Sustainable manufacturing is about running end-to-end operations efficiently and emitting less while doing so. It’s about empowering the engineers and operators in the facility with the right information at the right time. By understanding the real-time behavior of their assets and processes as a system, one should be able to then quickly identify the root cause of inefficient operations and make an informed decision.
Smart Industry: What is one example of a net-zero approach boosting profitability?
Harding: One good example is what we did with BP, gathering volumes of data to leverage AI-driven algorithms to run optimization simulations. Turning insights into action reduced methane vented from wells by 74%. Even better, production volumes increased by 20%, while overall costs have dropped by 22%.
Klosterman: Net zero requires an understanding of the root cause. It is not acceptable to repair the obvious symptoms. By identifying and eliminating the root cause, you see substantial gains such as production improvement, reduced emissions, lower capital requirements for asset integrity, safety efficiency and improvements.
Jiwani: The realistic path to achieving net zero is through improving operating efficiency. It is about achieving better production results by consuming less energy and lowering emissions. For example, production engineers at one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the Asia-Pacific region have automated their entire production operations, where they are now making sub-second automated control decisions through software that looks at multiple variables in real-time—reservoir health, pump speed, production demand, etc. It offers recommendations that can be applied either manually or automated completely. This has led to more than 20% improvements in operational efficiency, while significantly reducing costs.
Smart Industry: What most excites you about the capabilities of digital transformation regarding sustainable manufacturing in the future?
Harding: It is exciting to see industrial intelligence help companies find and fix problems that prevent emissions. It is personally gratifying to witness how these solutions help provide better collaboration and decision-making. Empowering engineers across their operations enables companies to do more with less.
Klosterman: The ability to visualize "One Vision of the Truth." By breaking down the data silos, ALL information will be utilized for analytics and visualized by all.
Jiwani: The most exciting element of digital transformation in manufacturing is about its impact on the "double bottom line." By breaking down the silos across systems, teams, etc., we are able to empower engineers with the right information at the right time, by creating a single source of truth across their systems, processes and operations. This allows the engineers and operators to be better equipped and empowered to make informed decisions on how to meet their production and sustainability goals.
