Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Smart #manufacturing : Energy Savings & Sustainability

14 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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1:14

In this segment, speaker Michael Ungar explains that over the past one to two years, energy efficiency and sustainability—particularly concepts like energy productivity and energy management—have risen to become one of the top three drivers for manufacturers to invest in smart manufacturing technologies. While traditional manufacturing improvements such as higher productivity, increased throughput, and better quality have always contributed both directly and indirectly to energy productivity, many operational leaders still struggle to link these operational gains to concrete sustainability and ESG outcomes that affect the corporate bottom line. The speaker highlights a persistent disconnect: stakeholders often fail to recognize how long‑standing efficiency initiatives translate into measurable ESG value.

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One of the really interesting dynamics we've seen in the last couple years is that energy and sustainability, energy productivity as an idea, and all of its sort of manifestations, energy management and so on and so forth, has not always been a top priority or the top sort of strategic reason for manufacturers to invest in these kinds of capabilities. In the past year to 2 years, it has become one of the top 3 catalysts for investing and strategic initiatives for investing in smart manufacturing. And one of the interesting things that we're seeing is that many of the typical things that we've been doing for decades now to improve productivity, improve throughput, improve quality, those have both an indirect and a direct input to energy productivity. But we're not as manufacturing operations stakeholders, we're not always great at connecting the dots between what, what that value creation means to the bottom line of our sustainability initiatives or to the ESG initiatives that our corporations are aiming at and looking to do the best to accomplish.