In the late 90s, discussions around climate change, pollution, sustainable practices in industrial production and global warming began taking place across world forums frequently. However, action items and the progress of initiatives were seldom held accountable and tracked for completion. Moving two decades into the future and today, the tides have changed considerably in this regard. Environmental, Social, and Governance or ESG goals are today hotly pursued by the business community as the world is finally waking up to signs of impact from uncontrolled pollution and environmental destruction.

In a nutshell, ESG refers to initiatives that are planned to make business activities more sustainable and environment friendly as well as ensuring that there is an adequate contribution to making our planet a safer and healthier place to live for future generations. Irrespective of industrial sectors, the investor community worldwide is pressuring businesses of all sizes to transition more of their physical assets into ESG assets. In other words, bringing industrial assets under an ESG plan will ensure that business operations are audited for compliance with environmental safety and there is a well-defined plan to safeguard the environment from any harsh impacts that may occur in the natural course of business operations.

With everything from stock prices to customer sentiments being tied to ESG goals, enterprises, especially those involved in industrial and manufacturing sectors, require major course corrections and transformations in the way they operate. While the thought of going in for ESG may sound very challenging, enterprises have the option to seamlessly translate their ESG goals into reality- by leveraging technology.
Let us examine three ways in which technology can be a game-changer in empowering enterprises to meet their ESG goals and ultimately win more customer and investor loyalty by being a socially responsible brand.

Intelligent Reporting

One of the most grueling tasks with respect to adhering to a sustainable ESG roadmap is continuous reporting to track alignment with defined objectives. Every facet of operation has its own unique metrics and standards that must be documented, tracked, and reported to concerned regulatory or audit bodies. Following a manual route for this reporting will be a Herculean task with huge cost involved. By leveraging a cutting-edge solution that centrally maintains all the data and offers an intelligent reporting capability, the challenges in reporting can be effortlessly solved. From empowering stakeholders in different processes or departments to automatically document and capture relevant operational metrics to proactively notifying the leadership about progress or hurdles, technology solutions can help transition end-to-end reporting into an automated framework for compliance.

Collaborative Portfolio Management

An industrial organization would comprise multiple departments and processes that operate with different standards and geopolitical credentials if the business is distributed globally. However, ESG is a global initiative that every subsidiary and internal hierarchy of the organization will need to adhere to achieve defined goals. For this, there is a need to have an organized and transparent view of the entire portfolio of ESG assets that an organization has across locations and within individual business units. 

For example, an automobile manufacturer would have manufacturing locations in different countries or different states within the same country. Similarly, their manufacturing plant may be diversified into further modular establishments like separate units for chassis, engines, etc. All these individual units may involve end-to-end processes and phases like procurement, logistics, supply chain, vendor management, storage, utility, and power management. For ESG goal realization, it is important to have centralized portfolio management of defined goals for each of these units and sub-processes. Metrics, reports, KPIs, audit data, and several other pieces of information need to be captured across the length and breadth of each granular process. With a comprehensive technology solution, it is possible to empower stakeholders at different levels to capture their operational data automatically, seamlessly relay the data to centralized portfolio management, and ultimately provide insights to leaders and jointly work on decisions to meet ESG goals across the organization.

Responsive Infrastructure

ESG standards and practices will be constantly upgraded depending on global resolutions and movements that occur periodically. For enterprises, this means that they need to ensure that their physical infrastructure, like machinery, heavy equipment, factory floors, facilities, etc., adheres to standard requirements in pollution, performance, emission norms, and similar parameters continuously. To achieve this agility, it is important to onboard smart technology that transforms your industrial ecosystem into a highly intelligent and automated environment. By leveraging IIoT and smart sensor technologies, it becomes easier to track the efficiency of physical components and equipment and make note of their emissions as well as power consumption levels. When anomalies are encountered, respective stakeholders can be informed proactively, and steps can be taken to prevent the defect from leading to disruption of goals set for ESG compliance.

Empowering modern industrial enterprises to meet their ESG commitments is one of the biggest success stories that technology is bringing to the Industry 4.0 revolution. However, it is important to have the right technology in place for enabling seamless ESG compliance assurance. This is where Delpheon brings in an industry-leading experience for empowering industrial organizations to streamline their operations with cutting-edge IIoT offerings.

Get in touch with us to learn more about realizing your ESG goals with the most comprehensive range of Industrial IoT solutions.