Are your sustainability efforts “Comfortably Numb”?

According to Accenture’s UN Global Compact Study June 2021, 62% of CEOs say that the pressure to act on sustainability grew significantly over the last three years.

One focus of the new green economy with regard to sustainability is the usage of alternate energy sources.  Manufacturers need to define sustainable alternative energy usage in terms of availability, scalability, value, and costs. They need to consider that every element on earth is not unlimited. This fact is one of the easily overlooked risks of the green economy, because in some arenas it is based on projections where we can limitlessly scale lithium, cobalt, and other minerals, with totally unprecedented speed.  Some are also making assumptions about how much there is and how easy it is to attain. This can lead to a road where one is operating blindly in a “comfortably numb” state. That assumption could, in some instances, bring about a resource crash, (which we’re already seeing), when you unsystematically steer your manufacturing processes to depend on these resources without really knowing their economic scalability.

In the free economy, and because supply and demand drive costs, the price system will quickly articulate if you’re relying on one particular material or resource that is not scalable enough to meet the requirement. Having this information sooner rather than later will provide the intelligence to consider where other sources and materials could be a better option, saving time and cost in the process and side-stepping manufacturing delays or interruptions.

At SAP, we want our customers to become an intelligent sustainable enterprise where they can take advantage of AI for the availability of alternative energy resources and use these tools to select specific sustainable materials, sources, and processes that can be scaled globally. 

Our focus is efficient manufacturing utilizing digital twin strategies and maintaining an unbroken digital thread from beginning to end or what we call,  Design to Operate.  You don’t have to function as if you’re on “The Dark Side of the Moon”.