Rebecca Gibson |
Earlier this year, AVEVA named Lisa Johnston as its chief sustainability officer, tasking her with the responsibility for managing its environmental sustainability initiatives. Here, she shares her perspective on how a global organisation like AVEVA can help the industrial sector to operate more efficiently and sustainably.
How is AVEVA contributing towards lowering carbon emissions and achieving green goals for its customers?
We are committed to working with our customers to help them to drive sustainability in engineering, operations and performance. We work with leading companies to leverage the power of our ecosystem to deliver solutions and expertise to optimise sustainable performance and boost circularity. From water and energy to food and infrastructure, our solutions transform opportunity into business value. We use collaborative innovation to empower people and industries to thrive. Our portfolio breadth creates a shared common environment enriched with intelligent analytics and empowered by the cloud. This enables customers to deploy products and services faster, reduce energy consumption, cut emissions and share collaborative innovation, boosting sustainable outcomes for everyone.
How can technology solve eco-related problems?
The future belongs to companies who take advantage of deeper intelligence to empower future workforce generations, while supporting efficient, connected and sustainable working models. Digitisation and sustainability can be two sides of the same coin. AVEVA’s software supports sustainable outcomes by plumbing our broad and deep specialist capabilities into the scale and scope of the cloud to deliver digitally transformed ways of working improve engineering, operations and performance outcomes to deliver diverse environmental benefits for customers.
What’s next for sustainability?
In the coming decade, AVEVA believes that sustainability will become essential to industrial business models across the value chain – from sourcing and supply chain to the production line and end of asset lifecycles.
Since 2010 there’s been a marked increase in corporate sustainability commitments, indicating that businesses are starting to look at sustainability as something that should be at the core of their operations. Companies are increasingly feeling a responsibility to demonstrate that they care about the environment, and that concern is reflected in the interests of our communities, investors and regulators too.
This new reality brings many opportunities for industry leaders to drive toward a sustainable future, from lobbying governments for more climate action, to engaging in new collaborations with companies like AVEVA. We anticipate that the next step will be for consumers and companies to join forces to create sustainable business models, founded on new models of interaction and collaboration. Our recent collaboration with Microsoft and Waterforce (a major agribusiness in New Zealand) shows that new sustainable business models founded on sustainable principles are emerging. This is just the start of a bigger wave of change, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of that, alongside our partners at Microsoft.
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2020 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.