Regulatory changes in the EU have put a price on CO2. The urgency to cut emissions adds a new perspective on a company’s competitiveness with enormous effects on the supply chain. All in all, it creates a new industrial logic where companies striving to successfully transform into a more sustainable business, require new functional capabilities.
“What environmental claims can we make about product D?”, asks the sales department. “How does the carbon footprint on this product change if we use plastics instead of aluminum?”, says the engineers. “Which process in our factory has the highest environmental impact?”, continues the operations manager. Would you be able to answer these questions about your business?
Probably not. Siloed information, disconnected systems, unstructured low-quality data and a lack of competence make it difficult to find “a single source of truth” when it comes to ESG data within an organization.
Transformation requires new capabilities
As customer demands increase and regulations tighten, continuing as before is not an option – and the ambitions need to go well beyond ESG regulations. This is also what Cognizant see happening among our customers as sustainability issues have become business imperatives. How? It allows differentiation of business models, stronger innovation capabilities, improved risk management and brand building, together with cost savings through sustainability-related operational efficiencies.
Going beyond ESG initiatives, however, requires foundational capabilities to transform the business. Today, most companies don’t have the data systems or people capabilities to deliver sustained transformation capability. The transformation has traditionally been cost-driven.
“The twin transition”
Meeting the obligatory burdens and attracting investors and customers, while also enabling resource avoidance and optimization, differentiated products and services and sustainable business models, call for a major overhaul of current processes, systems and solutions.
What do we mean by this? You need a “twin transition” where the net-zero transition and digital transformation must go hand-in-hand; one cannot exist without the other. To succeed, it’s critical to understand where the enterprise’s capabilities fall short and to build a pathway to uplift core capabilities.
This is what we are good at within Cognizant. Using our integrated framework, we help clients understand the velocity, the effort and stakeholder responsibility. Among other things, it’s about prioritizing ESG metrics based on potential value, defining optimized metrics journeys, driving better business decisions through governed data assets, prioritizing technology capabilities to enable scalability, and enabling a new operating model to deliver consistently and well. We then prioritize the deployment of foundational capability in the enterprise IT/OT model to drive business outcomes.
Several ongoing Nordic projects
Have we driven tangible sustainability projects, with digital transformation at the center, with Nordic manufacturing companies before? Yes. Among the current examples is a pump manufacturer where an integrated IOT-based service delivery framework improved the revenue lifecycle, AI-driven crop evaluation within the aquaculture industry, improved sustainable product lifecycle management with a focus on Scope 3 at a consumer product brand, together with integrated refrigeration monitoring between processing, transport and store shelves to improve energy efficiency for a food and beverages company.
If you’d like to learn more, please visit the manufacturing and/or sustainability section of the web and get in contact with my highly skilled colleagues in this field.
