Good News: You Can Operationalize Sustainability to Meet Goals Faster
Interview with Steve Pavlosky,
Vice President – Product Management, Proficy Software & Services, GE Vernova
This story was originally published in our Annual and Sustainability Report 2023.
Steve, what are companies’ biggest challenges related to sustainability?
The foremost challenges in addressing industrial organizations’ sustainability impact are:
• Access to high-quality data relevant to sustainability goals
• Understanding how to act upon the data
• Change management to create value at speed
Fortunately, the industrial community has an existing software infrastructure in place that can support operationalizing sustainability goals, and we have experience with digital transformation – whether to drive plant efficiency, sustainability, quality, or other goals.
Let me be clear: we’re not starting at the beginning. We have the automation, industrial data management, dashboards, and analytics technology to support this demand for data and drive the right actions to help optimize utilities usage and provide energy savings.
How are you enhancing existing software to help meet sustainability goals?
Industrial companies can use existing HMI/SCADA, MES and historian technology enhanced with modern, persona-based dashboards and industrial analytics.
This innovation can provide industrial companies with the ability to monitor, benchmark, understand, and then optimize resource consumption within each plant in their enterprise. They can then correlate that consumption to its impact on environmental KPIs and improve production. With impact to efficiency, cost, and sustainability visible, operations teams can make better decisions to optimize according to their priorities as they change.
Regulatory standards for ESG data reporting are rapidly solidifying. Companies need to both report on the standard metrics these define and align their manufacturing operations teams to drive improvement on those same performance metrics.
What kind of results are you seeing?
Each company has a different digital transformation maturity, and results vary based on specific applications and implementations. We have seen companies achieve energy results in the double digits, and I encourage you to explore your opportunities.
Furthermore, the software can provide companies with the contextualized data that is needed to operationalize progress toward sustainability KPIs, such as the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon footprints.
Operational emissions and other sustainability KPIs can be managed alongside cost, throughput, quality, or other operational target.
Do you have a customer example to share?
An automotive Tier 1 manufacturer recently achieved 18% energy savings on its factory heating systems. The company looked to leverage their existing GE SCADA with new analytics and dashboard innovation to optimize the heating and cooling in its many energy-intensive production facilities.
The enhanced solution optimizes system setpoints based on outside air temperatures. Additionally, our analytics identified a problem in the heating system control related to response to temperature setpoints as well as a problem with valves not closing correctly.
I love how analytics are layered with their existing software to support sustainability
That’s our goal – jump start sustainability improvements by enhancing your existing digital infrastructure.
A sustainability insights solution such as Proficy is designed to connect to a company’s historical production data as well as context and event data, allowing for real-time monitoring of usage and correlation to key operating conditions, including product SKUs.
Advanced multi-faceted analytics can help to detect previously unrecognized patterns, waste, and opportunities for improvement, so companies can understand their utilities consumption comprehensively.
The solution also can provide recommendations for better performance by modeling usage and predicting where setpoints and process conditions could be changed to minimize consumption. These capabilities can allow industrial companies to better visualize, report, and act on the sustainability and financial goals that will keep their business competitive.
Can you talk about the combination of analytics and the sustainability dashboards?
Real-time utilities optimization dashboards can enable engineers and operators to continuously benchmark, explain, and improve utilities consumption at plants and facilities throughout the enterprise. The software can help empower companies to:
• Benchmark: “Are we currently consuming too much on any meter?”
Users can compare real-time actual usage against expected, normal, or targeted consumption and receive real-time alerts.
• Explain: “Why are we using too much now?”
Analytics running in the background can correlate each meter with other operational data to identify possible causes when consumption is greater than expected or targeted to help identify improvement opportunities.
• Improve: “How can we improve consumption?”
Engineers can configure and deploy simple control rules or optimize to switch equipment on/off, recommend or automatically change control setpoints, and more.
With sustainability insights, companies can compare current performance to budgeted consumption amounts and improvement targets, prior best demonstrated performance, and expected consumption based on past performance for each monitored utility (water, fuel, electricity, steam, compressed air, etc.).
How can companies move forward?
GE Vernova and Novotek are your partners in operationalizing your sustainability goals. We’re here to help you develop your next steps to support and operationalize goals. With the combination of GE Vernova and Novotek, industrial companies can use our experience, best practices, and innovation to help make a difference.
