Driving Sustainability by harnessing the power of Digitalization

Driven by emerging regulations (Supply Chain Act, CBAM, etc.) and reporting obligations (CSRD & GRI), companies must react now to meet sustainability requirements. If companies wait to prepare, the costs and resources required for catching up will increase exponentially in the future.

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What do companies need to do now?

Our recommendations

1. Be aware of the impact of current and future regulatory and reporting requirements on your business. Certain data, resources, and technologies to safeguard compliance might already be available within your existing (digital) infrastructure!
2. Don't cannibalize your own resources while addressing the needs of the necessary transformation towards sustainability and digitalization – identify and benefit from synergies!

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In our sustainability assessments and roadmapping, we very often see that digitalization and sustainability do not go hand-in-hand. Many digitalization teams, which have been set up with much effort and diligently developed over the past 5-10 years, see the emerging sustainability teams as a threat or competitor for resources (splitting the budget, reprioritizing within the company, etc.).

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3. Clarification from top management is needed that digitalization is one key enabler to make sustainability economical and profitable for your company in the long run.
4. Use and analyze the already existing infrastructure - especially digitally mature companies can derive a lot of relevant data (energy & resource consumption, material waste, or even carbon footprint of sub-components, etc.) already from existing inventory systems. In many cases, there is no direct need for huge investments in a completely new IT infrastructure, software systems, or sensors.
5. ‍Do not build parallel systems! Besides the economic aspect, the sustainability and digitalization teams will collaborate when they realize the added value that a common approach offers.

Digitalization – which in the past years was focused on enabling data-driven optimization of established production KPIs such as cost, quality, time, and flexibility – is certainly not enough to achieve sustainability in a company solitarily. However, it is an important and mighty tool that should be used in conjunction with physical sustainability-related measures like circularity-oriented product design, sustainable materials, and new energy systems to implement a comprehensive and long-term sustainability strategy.

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How can we support you?

1. Develop and challenge your sustainability strategy:
   We are your partner to get a clear picture of where you are now and a to develop a systematic action plan on how to move forward with measurable impact. With our experience from > 100 digitalization/sustainability assessments, we can quickly determine your status quo and develop a prioritized roadmap with specific recommendations for projects aligned with your individual goals and challenges together with you.
2. Consortium Project „Digital Pathways to Sustainability”
   We are striving to build a sustainable community of cross-industrial decision-makers sharing similar challenges, in which time-critical questions will be addressed and answered by work groups, supported and driven by technology and market analyses from relevant experts in industry, research, and academia.

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Possible questions

• How can I calculate my product's carbon footprint with the highest possible accuracy?
• How can the data from existing systems help to efficiently comply with recently developing reporting requirements?
• Which sustainable (and digital) business models are relevant for my company to stay competitive?
• What are the implications of the new requirements on my IT infrastructure and processes?
• How does the PFAS ban affect my business? What are alternatives?