Sustainable Manufacturing – How Technology can bring your Sustainability Goals to Life written by Meighan Heard, Executive Director, Commercial and Corporate, Mitsubishi Electric Australia
Addressing global economic and societal crises while simultaneously protecting our planet presents some of the greatest challenges of our lifetime. Businesses need to act now to put together strategies that allow everyone to not just survive—but thrive. For that, we need technology. Technology helps us better understand and minimize the impact our organisations have on our planet. It has the potential to enable every company to fulfill its responsibility to manage change, think in terms of the future, and seize opportunities to grow and adapt.
Corporate sustainability can mean different things to different organisations but one thing is clear: to be fully embraced, we must have goals around the responsible stewardship of our natural resources which are founded in sound operational decisions and provide a clear benefit to both business and the environment. Reducing waste, energy costs, carbon emissions and downtimes, efficiently utilizing existing resources, improving quality and the work environment, and minimising manufacturing costs, all contribute to protecting the environment and realising a successful business model.
Mitsubishi Electric Group has adopted and implemented sustainability initiatives throughout its group companies, manufacturing facilities, factories and value chain with a view to achieving a Net Zero target by 2050. These initiatives are propagated throughout Mitsubishi Electric’s products, solutions and operations.
ICONICS became part of the Mitsubishi Electric Group in 2019. Since 1986, it has been providing automation solutions to customers in manufacturing, processing and building automation around the globe. ICONICS’ software solutions support organizations in achieving their sustainability objectives and being more mindful of their environmental impact.
ICONICS’ platform and solutions have been built to help organizations collect, visualize and analyse real-time information. It can be applied to any manufacturing and industrial process in every industry and is suitable for use with all applications and on all devices. This approach supports organisations in obtaining the right kind of information as and when needed. Turning that lens to the systems that drive sustainability efforts is just as simple—and can often be done in tandem with the achievement of enormous business benefit.
One of the first steps in automating to achieve sustainability objectives is to bring facilities and equipment together in a way that delivers visibility into every single endpoint that uses or affects natural resources. It means having clarity on things like energy or water usage, how energy is being used for heating or cooling, what is needed to optimise building comfort and effective waste management. Having the right system is critical to obtaining this visibility. ICONICS IoTWorX is fully integrated with Azure and enables companies to connect their entire ecosystem into a single platform and gain a much deeper insight into how their processes are functioning. Implementing IoTWorX can be the first step for organisations seeking to apply automation to achieve sustainability objectives.
In recent years, ICONICS has been named both a Microsoft Sustainability Partner of the Year and IoT Partner of the Year for the development of its energy and facilities management analysis tools, including ICONICS IoTWorX. As an eleven-time Microsoft Partner of the Year, it develops IoT and cloud-ready solutions with Microsoft Azure to provide visualization and artificial intelligence-based connected worker software for manufacturing, industrial and smart building applications. Together, ICONICS, Microsoft and Mitsubishi Electric are committed to harnessing the power of technology to help everyone, everywhere—and build a more sustainable future.
In summary, ICONICS’ is proud to offer sustainability-focused solutions to help organisations:
(a) Reduce Costs and Protect the Environment: ICONICS’ can help to reduce energy costs through more efficient building energy management. It helps users to understand, improve, and optimize energy usage patterns to take advantage of off‐peak rates. It contributes towards LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) compliance, as well as towards an increase in overall environmental quality for occupants.
(b) Achieve Gains in Manufacturing Efficiency: Manufacturing production, monitoring and energy management rely heavily on automation to provide optimal operations and improve sustainability. ICONICS enables companies to streamline configuration with asset-based organization, OEE metrics, production and quality monitoring, and flexible reporting
(c) Optimise Maintenance Operations: ICONICS Azure-based Energy Smart Building solutions integrate information from a broad range of equipment and systems used for building management. ICONICS’ Fault Detection and Diagnostics technology pinpoints the exact location and even the specific piece of equipment that is malfunctioning or behaving inefficiently and offers a list of possible causes ranked by probability to reduce maintenance repair times. This enables customers to reduce energy costs, cut consumption, and significantly streamline facilities maintenance.
More Information:
https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/en/sustainability/environment/index.html
https://iconics.com/Industries/Sustainability