Sustainability, growth, data and diamonds

Posted on 3 Feb 2025 by The Manufacturer
Partner Content

How do you continue to grow, improve the bottom line, and still reach Net Zero? 

Where there’s muck, there’s brass

There’s a 20th-century expression, ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’. For those unfamiliar, ‘brass’ is a slang term for money, and muck was evidence of industrial products created, and money made. While ’England’s ‘dark satanic mills’ are not as soot-laden as they once were, invisible carbon, in the form of Green House Gas (GHG), CO2, is recognised as more of a problem for the world, the UK, and its Manufacturers. And as for ‘brass’, the expectation of continued revenue and profit growth is still a given.  

For many environmentalists though, growth is a dirty word. More growth means more muck in all its forms. So how can you grow without creating even more GHG and other pollutants without risking your Net Zero target? The answer is efficiency. To grow your business whilst reducing the amount of GHG and other pollutants requires you to improve efficiency. You can’t be sustainable without first being efficient.  Done properly, Net Zero targets encourage manufacturers to look at their whole value chain for efficiency improvements. Think of it as a new management discipline.  

Where there’s data, there’s gold

Modern manufacturers are driven to eliminate obvious inefficiencies and valuable waste. Otherwise, they would not still be in business. But the Net Zero targets required by the Paris Climate Accord and subsequent compliance requirements including the EU’s CSRD and the UK ISSB (IFRS – S1 and S2) are challenging. They require manufacturers to go further and think differently to handle the not-so-obvious. And even to deal with and account for what might seem like ‘other people’s carbon’.  

To truly unlock the value of industrial data in sustainability efforts, manufacturers must first tackle broader challenges in data management—ensuring integration, accuracy, and accessibility. Many businesses are still grappling with fragmented data systems, making it difficult to harness insights effectively. For a deeper dive into these challenges and how manufacturers are overcoming them, read The growing importance of (good) industrial data.

 

Some say that sustainability is essentially a data issue, but data isn’t worth much by itself. To make gold from data, you need to collect it systematically, put it into a useful context, understand its meaning, and then turn it into a useful action – or better still, a plan. 

In the context of compliance and sustainability, it means mapping out your potential sources of carbon data and figuring out where the gaps are. And if there is no data, you need a plan for that. Fortunately, the context for your carbon data has already been provided in the shape of documents published in the GHG Protocol.  

These documents provide useful ways to allocate carbon (Scope 1, 2, and 3).  The next challenge is to calculate carbon as tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) – which is how sensible comparisons are made across nations, companies, and even the individual level. Many calculation tools are available to help, but a calculator that integrates with your ERP could give real-time production updates. For more information on an ERP with this integration click here. 

The first aim is to create a CO2e baseline from which you can monitor and report your gradual improvements. While you can use spreadsheets, an ERP is a logical place to collect and store raw carbon-related data and calculated CO2e data from upstream sources, such as your supply chain in inventory and in the manufacturing process itself.  Innovations in and around the Smart Factory have made this easier, for example, measuring energy using IoT devices linked to MES systems. For more information on sustainability within your supply chain click here 

The GHG Protocol is nothing if not thorough and requires you to also account for and collect data for downstream carbon usage. This means your products’ transport, energy consumed in use, and eventual recycling or disposal to landfill.  You will likely need to consider a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and lifetime measurement approach and re-design products to produce less carbon, not just in manufacture, but also along the downstream chain.  

By the time you have collected a fraction of this data, you will need a decent BI and Analytics tool and should consider hiring a Data Analyst too. Or else to choose a low code-no code analytics tool for a layman to use and to report and suggest improvements. Early insight into the correct or ‘next best action’ is how you find gold in carbon data. For more information a low code- no code tool click here. 

Where there’s carbon, there’s diamond

While larger organisations pursue sustainability improvements to meet compliance requirements, the regulations do not apply directly to smaller organizations. At least, not yet. However, I would caution smaller manufacturers to start now, because if you supply to a larger organisation, you could soon be asked to supply carbon data. If you can’t – then that business may go to a competitor who can.  

So, do it for competitive advantage – if not as a legacy for your children. Enlightened manufacturers are already using the carbon information to highlight their low-carbon credentials. When supplied to their customers at the product level or part level, carbon data can be a compelling sales angle. To update the ‘muck is brass’ saying for the 21st Century perhaps it’s, ‘Where there’s carbon, there’s diamond’. 


 Author: Paul Bates, Senior Product Manager , Epicor (UK) Software Ltd 


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