“Sustainable development”, “Environmental impact”, “Efficient use of resources”, “Supply chains, and “Decarbonization”. These are a few of the terms associated with ESG.

ESG is data-driven: manufacturers must comply with multiple local and often international regulations that require accurate, transparent, repeated, and detailed reports.

Machine builders and OEMs can take advantage of the tools that are provided by Unicloud to enable data harvesting and reporting that may be required to comply with ESG, while using the same data to drive efficiency and increase production.

What are ESG Regulations?

ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is a framework of goals defined by the G8 in different areas, such as: clean water and sanitation, poverty reduction, affordable and clean energy, climate action and more.

Some of these areas require businesses to measure, monitor, calculate, perform risk management and report as a key point of compliance.

ESG (Client action) regulations are particularly relevant to machine builders and the industries they serve. These include issues such as: the environmental impact of energy and raw material consumption, packaging, waste management, and how to improve their operational efficiency.

This requires businesses to redefine their production processes and improve product lifecycle. This can effectively increase product performance and make their products more attractive to customers while reducing production costs.

Each ESG criteria and each set of regulations has its own standards and metrics to follow, but the goal is the same: to make businesses adopt strategies that result in a cost-efficient and sustainable ecosystem. For the long run it’s a win-win situation for all parties.

We can see that environmental concerns are becoming more and more significant to individuals and nations. Some have passed ESG legislation requiring companies
to actively pursue sustainability strategies that demand actions from different links in their supply chain and this includes machine builders.

Does ESG affect your business?

For a number of reasons, the answer is definitely YES.

You now can provide your customers with a complete solution.

Join a growing environmental business eco system were companies, people and communities will do business only with ecofriendly parties.

1. Boost your brand.

2.Raise your competitive advantages.

3.Increase sales by identifying new business opportunities.

4.Keep your business relevant, and at the cutting-edge of technology.

5.Increase sales.

In addition, sustainability and environmental issues have a powerful effect on business investment policies. Enterprises that follow ESG regulations and adhere to its compliance criteria are more attractive to investors who are looking for environmentally “green” investments.

A recent McKinsey report presents a case of a chemicals company that took part in the worldwide effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Over a three-year period, they cut their energy consumption on different sites by 7-13%, in a project which accrued almost $50 million in annual savings.

It’s a win-win situation for all parties.

Today, Machine Builders and System Integrators are required to provide their customers with a complete solution – From Machine to Cloud and Back – that provide connectivity to Cloud services to monitor and control ESG KPI’s.

UniCloud is a complete Cloud solution developed by Unitronics.

Native to Unitronics controllers, UniCloud can connect to a variety of smart devices from multiple vendors using a Unitronics UCR. In addition to new installations, you can integrate your existing installations with UniCloud without having an impact on their functionality and performance, which positions UniCloud as a key solution for businesses for obtaining and managing their KPI’s.

ESG reporting requirements are becoming obligatory worldwide, but they are anything but simple to implement, and necessitate a huge amount of work.

Businesses that already have a cloud based IioT platform in place to measure, harvest application data, analyze it, monitor, and automatically generate reports on environmental performance have the advantage over their competitors.

By using a centralized cloud-based platform, they can use their data to optimize business operations, cut costs, and benefit from new market opportunities, while using the same system to meet regulatory requirements.

What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should I track?

Governments expect businesses to use environmental KPIs to calculate their environmental footprint to understand their effect on the environment.

There are different categories of environmental KPIs; businesses must identify in which areas they are required to measure.

ESG2
Commonly required KPIs include:
Greenhouse gas emissions: Carbon dioxine, methane, nitrous oxide, etc.
Water pollutants : metals, organic contaminants, etc.
Waste: rouble, metal, acids, solid waste, etc.
Resource usage: fossil fuels, metals, water, etc.

Let UniCloud work for you

Keeping aligned with ESG regulations is not a onetime effort; it is a continuous effort.

For example, to meet the ESG-required KPIs, maintain transparency, and maintain an open line of communication with regulators, you must report your CO2 footprint (Carbon Dioxide). This requires you to continuously monitor and measure consumption of fuels and other materials, energy consumption, cooling, heating, use of water and other resources – all this data and more is needed to calculate and track your effect on the environment.

If your assets are spread across many geographical areas, different organizations, and departments, maintaining regulatory compliance can be quite a challenge.

To meet this challenge, you need to be able to:

1. Access all your Assets to collect data continuously, all the time, over time.

2. Centralize all measured data into one repository, such as UniCloud.

3. Produce accurate, detailed reports.

4. Perform real-time risk management to avoid ESG KPI’s violations.

5. Analyze and track factors that affect your environmental footprint.

6. Perform tasks automatically.

7. Minimize your ESG task workload.

The good news is that you can already perform these actions today with UniCloud, and most of them can be performed automatically without overloading your current workload.

You can easily automate tasks by connecting your PLCs and devices to UniCloud.

Since UniCloud is a centralized cloud platform for all your Assetsit is simple to automatically monitor and collect your machines data, compare it, analyze it and get a global overview of your entire enterprise.

By using scheduled automatic reports, you can generate reports with real telemetry data as a CSV file, or as a PDF image of your Dashboards.

You can then specify who has the privilege to access those reports.

Security is an important core fundamental aspect of UniCloud. You can find more about it, including our ISO certifications at https://unitronics.cloud/security-fundamentals/

4 Essential ESG management tips you must know

How can you use UniCloud to perform risk management, to find values that can impact your ESG footprint calculation?

Easy. Take advantage of UniCloud functionalities for Preventive Maintenance Analytics, Trend Analytics, and Cause Analytics.

1-Using Preventive Maintenance Analytics
Fix things before they break setting up Automatic Alerts via SMS or email is simple. Then, if you get an automatic alert that a filter needs to be replaced, or that your temperature sensor is performing badly, you can take action before a situation has been developed to totally halt your production line for a few hours, or days. Your customers will appreciate the smooth operation of their operation.

Preventive Analytics create value that customers are willing to pay for

2-Use Cause Analytics
By analyzing prior performance data and comparing various aspects over time, you can uncover factors that may interact and result in a higher CO2 footprint.

Below is an example of High CO2 measurement (Above 1000 = Poor Air) taken on 7.22. We can see that on the same date, high level of power consumption was measured while the speed has been decreasing.

This may indicate a possible connection between different factors which results in high CO2 measurements. Cause analytic is possible ONLY if you collect data over time so you can analyze different factors in different time ranges.

Data helps us to make smart business decisions.

3-Use Trend / Pattern Analytics
In the Trend example shown below, you can see a repeated pattern of CO2 measurements that have been increasing and decreasing daily for the last month. When you examine your data, you notice that these CO2 levels correlate to the machine energy consumption while temperature and water flow are in their normal performance range.

You might then conclude that you need to reduce the energy consumption of your equipment, and figure out why these values change repeatedly, while other variables continue to operate within their typical range. It may be that your machine hasn’t been running at peak performance, and that you have discovered an issue before it ran out of control. This may have resulted in increased power use and CO2 measurements, which can, in addition to negatively impacting your ESG profile – impact your ROI.

4-Use Automatic Alerts
Using the UniCloud Events tool enables you to automatically generate alerts whenever any measurement deviates from the values you set.

If any measurements deviate from or violate the restrictions defined by the ESG regulations, alerts can be delivered in real-time through email or SMS. You can take care of the problem right away with the aid of these immediate warnings.

UniCloud can assist you with the initial stages of applying ESG regulations to your manufacturing equipment or production floor.

While you are adjusting your product life cycle to fulfill ESG criteria, cause analytics can help you determine the factors that are having an impact on your performance.

Summary

For businesses and their machine suppliers, ESG requirements bring new opportunities as well as new challenges. Additionally, you can save money on energy and other resources by incorporating sustainability into your business plan and following ESG regulation criteria. It’s a win-win situation since you and your consumers will gain from reliable, efficient, and environmentally friendly machines while you strengthen your competitive advantage.
ESG compliance can also give you access to new B2B and B2C prospects.

By connecting your machines and smart devices to UniCloud, and by automating all measurements and reporting, you free yourself to focus on growing your business and providing new services to your customer.