Posted to News on 13th Oct 2025, 09:00
Supply chain sustainability starts on the factory floor
As pressure mounts to decarbonise the industrial supply chain, the factory floor has prime potential to cut the carbon footprint. The key is to understand how this can be achieved, says Francois Disch, Digital Transformation Consulting Leader, Schneider Electric.
A report from MIT Technology Review on Equipment Management and Sustainability provides an answer in the form of a roadmap that can be followed by manufacturing businesses in the UK. The roadmap offers five key takeaways to progress towards the UK's target of achieving Net Zero by 2050. These takeaways are: modernisation, data visibility, design for sustainability, increased efficiency and the factory floor acting as an important 'command-and-control' point for a larger decarbonisation journey.
The sector is already making good progress to the Net Zero by 2025 goal, with the latest 2024 figures reporting a 9% drop in emissions. This was largely achieved due to blast furnace closures in the iron and steel industry and lower coal use across industry as a whole. However, there were also many small contributors, highlighting how any small energy savings can add up.
Using a service partner to overcome challenges
Modernisation of legacy assets is one of the first steps manufacturers can take to cut their carbon footprint. This will reduce the amount of energy and raw materials used in production, and it can cut CO2 emissions drastically as a result.
However, planning and delivering modernisation requires expert knowledge and time - and factory managers don't always have this luxury. A service partner can support modernisation in three ways, which a factory manager can use individually or in combination.
The first is site auditing, which evaluates and maps electrical and automation systems. This creates a baseline view of current assets that can form the basis of a plan. The key is to use a partner with expert knowledge of automation and power systems, as well as experience in factory upgrades.
The second type of service aims to maximise the lifecycle of assets by modernising or upgrading individual machines. During this, the service experts will develop a plan to incorporate digitalisation. In addition, they can minimise waste and disruption by replacing only time-served equipment, while retaining assets such as cabling and cabinet that remain in good condition.
Third is an ongoing services membership such as Schneider Electric's EcoCare, which puts the monitoring and maintenance of the newly improved operations into the hands of specially trained experts who are available 24/7.
Sustainability-as-a-service removes the guess work and ensure that all investment on the factory floor contributes meaningfully to sustainability of the entire supply chain.
By using bespoke service memberships manufacturers in legacy or new facilities can quickly enable condition-based maintenance initiatives, unlocking real-time factory floor insight which allows much greater accuracy for both maintenance and modernisation schedules. Industrial services ensure that the skills and expertise needed to measure performance and implement schedules that will support the journey of the manufacturer, safe in the knowledge that whatever capabilities they seek in the future can be implemented.
Sustainability on the factory floor
Other actions that manufacturers can take to decarbonise are around energy. For example, they can source low-carbon energy or invest in their own renewable energy microgrid.
They can also focus on resources. For example, by improving the energy consumption of machinery and equipment such as electric motors. Alternatively, they can reduce the number of processes or change processing steps to cut energy consumption or use of raw materials.
One example is the US steel company Castrip, which cut the carbon footprint of steel strip production by 80-85% by combining multiple energy-intensive production steps.
Another example comes from the other end of the product life, where construction equipment OEM Doosan Bobcat has a strategy to look at the full lifecycle of its products to increase each machine's recyclability and send less waste to landfill.
Command-and-control
As the sector takes action on the 'quick wins' of fuels and electricity under Scope 1 and 2 emissions, it has become clear that Scope 3 is often a major source of emissions. Scope 3 emissions include the energy embedded in raw materials that are sourced for production. It includes the energy used to make the steel, plastics and chemicals delivered to the factory gates.
Cutting the carbon footprint of these materials requires a 'command and control' approach to the supply chain. OEMs that want to drive down Scope 3 emissions are demanding that their suppliers take action in cutting two ways.
The first is cutting their own emissions, often by addressing energy consumption at their production sites, and sourcing and recycling waste material, which typically uses less energy than sourcing virgin materials. The second way is by having their environmental footprint data certified. The OEM buying the materials will benefit by having greater certainty over this data, which feeds into its own sustainability reporting. For example, the 1,000 top suppliers engaged in Schneider's Zero Carbon Project have made notable progress in adopting energy efficiency initiatives and shifting to renewable energy, leading to an overall reduction in supplier emissions of 40% by the end of 2024. The objective is to reduce them by 70% by 2025.
The most crucial factor of the sustainability of the supply chain journey is to not see the factory floor as isolated.
Accelerating decarbonisation
Make UK's Digitalise to Decarbonise report shows that consumers are increasingly demanding sustainable products and this is placing pressure on OEMs. From the other side of the supply chain, the UK Government has set the target of a 66% reduction in industrial emissions compared to 2018 levels. So, with manufacturers facing pressure from all directions to decarbonise, sustainability is shifting from being a customer benefit to a business-critical need for any manufacturer looking to remain competitive.
The good news for manufacturers is there has never been a better time to pursue sustainability as next-generation service models remove the complexities around decarbonisation. Services such as Schneider Electric's EcoConsult, EcoFit and EcoCare are redefining maintenance strategies for the sustainable future by helping manufacturers overcome the three major challenges of setting a baseline, planning upgrades and ensuring proactive access to expertise. Manufacturers eager to trade on their green credentials should explore a service partnership that gathers the best from people, equipment, and digital capabilities to proactively monitor, support, maintain, fix, and advise factory floor operations 24/7.
