In this interview, Brenda Discher, SVP, Business Strategy & Marketing, Siemens, explains how to drive awareness of the sustainability topic and some of the highlights of Hannover Messe 2022.
Lucian Fogoros: Many companies talk about energy efficiency and sustainability, but they have no idea how much energy they consume or their carbon footprint. What is Siemens doing for its customers to drive awareness of sustainability?

Brenda Discher: We look at this in two different ways, both in terms of what we are doing inside of Siemens to improve our sustainability efforts. And we launched a program earlier this year called DEGREE, which looks all the way from our operations to what we’re doing with our employees, too. The other thing we’re doing is inside of industries. In my world, for Digital Industries, we are taking the time to work within an ecosystem with our customers to figure out how we both affect topline and profitability. So how do we affect growth by delivering more sustainable solutions and sustainable partnerships with our customers? But then also, what are we doing to improve the profitability? Sustainability is going to be the mission of every customer.

Every single customer is now coming to us asking: How can you help us? If I look at our portfolio, we have a carbon calculator that sits inside Teamcenter. It can look at all the components used for the entire product lifecycle, predict for you, and monitor the carbon footprint. But we also have in our automation business the ability to understand the impact of carbon and the impact on the products for our customers.

There is a dashboard available to your customers so they can say here’s what my impact is on the carbon footprint. So, we’re working on apps and ways for the customer to see their actual dashboard and personalize it for their needs.

And we also recently announced the Estainium Network, which works with a bunch of third parties. We believe this is where we have to co-create with third parties, our customers, and our engineers to advance sustainable innovation that works for our customers and works in their industries.

What a mobility customer needs versus an aerospace customer needs is very different. We have unique needs in these industries, but we also have other areas of the process that the customer has chosen to focus on.

So here, again, we’re working on our operations, and we’re working to provide these tools for our customers.

Lucian Fogoros: What role does the sustainability aspect play for companies to go digital and why?

Brenda Discher: First off, the investment in digitalization has a huge payoff towards sustainability, especially if you think about what we presented at Hannover this year, which is the digital product and the digital production, and then converting that into the virtual product and the virtual production.

So inherently sustainability, if you think about things like the digital twin, which is something we’ve invested in for ten years, the more you can represent every facet of your product, plant, or factory in a digital representation, the more you can simulate. So, you can optimize and do iterations digitally, which automatically has a significant benefit on the products and materials produced. The second thing that I think is important is the technology and the tools. We have the ability for you to pick different materials and different manufacturing processes, and you can calculate the carbon footprint of the different materials and the different aftermarket products that are being used to understand the sustainability footprint. The third is using data. If you think about how far we’ve come with things like IoT. There’s now a tremendous amount of information collected from sensors, whether in the plant, the factory, the product, or an automobile, for example. So, the closed loop from a digital twin through to how a product is used in the ecosystem is another incredible benefit we’re working through.

What are the most incredible things people could see at the Siemens booth in Hannover this year?

We had the virtual wall, all of the things that we can do in virtual, so from a virtual process to the virtual production to the virtual product, and then we have the physical. We had set up actual prototypes of an electric vehicle called the SimRod. Super cool little car. That’s an electric car. And people could see how that car was designed. Visitors could look at some of the prototyping and the energy footprint designed for that car.

So, this year Hannover Messe’s visitors could experience virtual/physical worlds, bringing the real and digital together.

You can watch the interview we recorded during the Hannover Messe 2022 show here https://www.linkedin.com/video/live/urn:li:ugcPost:6937384694388850688/

Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement only. Opinions are my own.