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August 10, 2023

Green Investments for Sustainability

mats Sustainability-Articles, Sustainability-Conferences

TRIRIGA ESG Forum II

Driving Sustainability initiatives with GreenLight by Deloitte
IBM Sustainability Software Integration Accelerators
Green Investments for Sustainability
Panel Discussion

Green Investments for Sustainability

Abstract

How is sustainability impacting your capital projects? Your investment projects is one viewpoint to PLAN, EXECUTE, MONITOR and REPORT on your sustainability strategy and goals. With this session we want to discover your experiences in the parameters you use for identifying, estimating, tracking and reporting on your green investment projects.

TririgaWorld2023-Green-Investments

Takeaways from workshop

Facility level parameters mostly considered for sustainability project prioritization.
Space consolidation and optimization remains the biggest motivators.
Different building information models and frameworks makes mapping facility level parameters to sustainability parameters challenging.
ESG data is scattered and managed by business and operational personas across the organizational hierarchy in ways that can support such sustainability decisions.
Organizations are not utilizing green clauses for lease and vendor management.
Organizations are strategizing their sustainability programs to meet reporting requirements, rather than its environmental impact.

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January 7, 2023

Sustainable Operations

mats Sustainability-Articles

Introduction

Sustainability and environmental impact is becoming a driver for all corporations, as a financial risk and as a market opportunity. Sustainability organizations are challenged by the disruptive introduction of new operational infrastructure, manual collection of environmental data, and environmental data quality. Operations in industry sectors are expected to contribute by sustainability data for environmental critical assets and processed and track carbon footprint across an asset lifecycle.

Customers across industries can adopt regulatory carbon accounting by using the HSE add-on in Maximo Application Suite to manage and report on environmental impact from their asset infrastructure and operational Enterprise Asset Management workflows.

This article outlines the concept designs to deliver incremental environmental capabilities in IBM Maximo Application Suite.

Sustainability defined

Global policies and regulations have increasingly aligned with international commitments toward Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals. Major enterprise corporations, and mid to small companies alike, are looking to become more sustainable. Not only to reduce the risks of major scandals but also to remain competitive. Companies are being held responsible for all aspects of sustainability from their supply chain, through operations to product delivery.

Enterprise organizations move up a three stages sustainability maturity curve.

Organizations are initially in a Compliance stage, reporting on mandatory regulations using manually collected data, often challenged by data at scale and low quality. Actions are taken to start collecting environmental impact data from existing environmental critical assets and operational workflows.

Most organizations move to an Optimization stage, with a defined sustainability strategy and started taking optimizing actions by defining goals, monitoring targets, running conservation projects, and acting on KPIs based on data analytic insights. Actions are taken to identify and act on bad environmental actors and start operational change programs to improve carbon footprint through emissions, consumption, sourcing and waste.

Some organizations transition into an Innovation stage, with investments in product and service innovation or a sustainable business transformation.

Organizations depends on safe, reliable and sustainable operations. Integrated processes across operations, maintenance and Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) have been proven to bridge organizational silos to improve operational performance. These processes utilize common asset structures and integrated safety processes. Extending HSE for sustainability is a logical extension of these capabilities.

Sustainable operation.

Sustainability and Environmental operational processes

Sustainability and Environmental operational processes may be organized into two process areas. Sustainable enterprise processes, owned by the corporate sustainability function, including definition and management of sustainability goals, metrics, and reporting, Sustainable operations processes owned by Safety and Environmental corporate functions and the operations business units. In the Safety and Environmental corporate functions, we find process owners as the environmental manager managing environmental policies, goals, impact, permits, consents, and compliance. The environmental manager also manages incident investigations and resulting changes to operational and environmental processes. The focus is set on optimizing the performance of environmental critical assets and identifying outliers across these assets.

Operations teams are responsible for implementing environmental policies, reporting on incidents with environmental impact, taking corrective actions, and reporting on emissions from operational activities. Such activities may be the consumption of energy and material, emissions through incidents, and waste from maintenance. Asset lifecycle presses involve purchasing, supply, transport, storage, usage, and waste management, tracked for the carbon footprint of an asset.

Asset and Location Meters concept design.

A more sustainable organization starts with your assets

Managing environmentally critical assets
Managing environmentally related incidents and corrective actions
Reporting and managing compliance
Identifying emission sources and capturing emissions
Improve ESG visibility in the Maintenance repair and Operations supply chain

In many organizations, IBM Maximo Application Suite is the system of record for operational assets and Enterprise Asset Management data and workflows, such as Assets, Work Orders, Inspections, Incidents, and Supply. Most of these business objects and processes have environmental

The IBM Envizi Sustainability Performance Management platform automates the collection and consolidation of sustainability data and becomes the system of record for sustainability goals, and metrics with analytics and reporting.

Environmental Extensions

The challenge

A challenge for operations team is introduction of disruptive introduction of new applications and processes. Changes require new system implementations and education on impacted operational roles. A requirement on extended environmental capabilities is the adaptability to currently configured workflows and data used by any organization.

The concept design addresses this challenge by extending the core Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) objects with new environmental objects that unified the heterogeneous asset information with a unified environmental model. The core EAM and HSE objects and their seamlessly injected environmental objects are discussed below.

Environmental profile and Emission sources

The Environmental Profile is a new object added to MAS Manage to uniformly manage operational environmental data in the context of a related Location or an Asset.

The Environmental Profile object links the environmental impact data related to events of the asset, such as consumption of fuel or power, emissions from leaks or spills, use of spare parts, and waste. The carbon footprint of each event, or Emission Source, is tracked in operational units and converted to a CO2 equivalent value. Operational data from events are automatically connected by meters, or manually entered through inspections.

By optionally configuring an asset Environmental Profile with meters in the assets parts hierarchy, the Environmental Profile object may trace to all environmental data in the context of a asset composition.

By filtering Emission Sources of an asset by type analytics can be performed to discover bad actors on emissions and improvements in asset reliability.

By designing a unified the Environmental Profile object, the integration with Enterprise Sustainability processes is greatly simplified. The Environmental Profiles provides traceability to all instances of environmental impact in the related context of an asset or location.

Information model

The Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) information model defines the key business objects that hold attribute data and interact in the workflows. The core EAM object and their significance to sustainability are described below.

Enterprise Asset Management model.

Assets and Locations

Assets and Functional Locations have an environmental footprint by general operations though continuous consumption of resources like energy, fuel, and water. The level of consumption may vary over time-based on operational production factors. The consumption is measured by the asset meters or location meters in operation consumption units. The type of consumed resources may change over time. For example, the type of refrigerant may be changed.

Figure below shows the environmental impact from an HVAC system asset with a list of emission sources from monthly maintenance and a recent refrigerant leak. The list is filtered to only show consumption of refrigeration material, demoting any emissions from Power consumption or other emissions sources.

Environmental profile of a Boiler asset.

Meters

Assets and Functional Locations have Meters that track the consumption data of the related entity. Data may be automatically provided by connected IoT sensors. Meter data may also be manually entered by a technician performing an Inspection.

Incidents

Incidents are unintended operational accidents that result in a release of material to the ground, water, and/or air. The type of material and amount are assessed or measured by the incident reporter. Following investigations may correct the environmental data reported by adjusting the amount and including any additionally identified releases related to a chain of events.

Figure below shows the emission source details of a HVAC system refrigerant leak. The refrigerant HFV-143a is used for the system and the CO2 equivalent of the refrigerant is computed.

Incident Event from a HVAC system leak.

Items

Items are spare rotating assets, parts, or consumables used for asset maintenance.

Item Masters is a specification of Items of a common type. Items have an associated environmental footprint over their end-to-end lifecycle, including manufacturing, transport, inventory, relocations, installation, maintenance, repairs, consumption, waste, and recycling.

Figure below shows the specification of a HFC-143a Triflouroetan refrigeration gas bottle. Such an Item Master is referenced by a Job Plan that defines the maintenance of the HVAC system. The specification of the item material and its environmental impact automates the emission calculation of the actual material used and waste produced by a maintenance work order.

Item Master of a HFC-143a Triflouroetan refrigeration gas bottle.

Inventory

Inventories are managing the stock of items used in asset maintenance. The inventory hence realizes the environmental accounting for the items supply chain. New stock of items will deposit environmental footprint INTO the inventory. Relocated, used or wasted items will withdraw environmental footprint FROM the inventory. The environmental footprint of each item, or selected types, is tracked. Any item environmental impact caused after the items has been withdrawn from the inventory is a process related to work orders or incidents.

Material

Material is the chemicals, ingredients, and products provided by a supply chain and used by operations.

Material is best defined in the context of items of operations by their type and chemical ingredients. Each item, or each content of an item, may have a CO2 equivalent contributing to its carbon footprint. Material is managed in a common service library.

Conclusions

Summary

Sustainability and environmental impact is becoming a driver for all corporations. The operational team will benefit from incrementally adopting environmental capabilities in Maximo Application Suite with the Manage application, acting as a system of record for customers with operational Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) workflows and data and supporting a sustainable operations transformation.

IBM Maximo Application Suite provides intelligent asset management, monitoring, predictive maintenance, and reliability in a single platform. It’s a single, integrated cloud-based platform that uses AI, IoT, and analytics to optimize performance, extend asset lifecycles and reduce operational downtime and costs. The HSE add-in for IBM Maximo Application Suite is providing a ready-to-deploy solution for managing operational environmental data and workflows. Integrations with IBM Envizi provide data connections to report on sustainability metrics.

Learn more about IBM Maximo Application Suite at https://www.ibm.com/products/maximo.

Learn more about IBM Envizi Sustainability Performance Management at https://www.ibm.com/products/envizi.

About the author

Mats Göthe is a Design Strategist and STSM in the IBM AI Application unit. Mats joined IBM Rational 25 years ago and have held various leadership positions in design, product management, development, sales, and services. Mats have a Ph.D. in physics and is based in Sweden.

Strategic Research on Sustainability
Learn about the enterprise importance and maturity in sustainability.

Operational Sustainability Scenarios
Learn about the Operational Sustainability design scenarios and sustainability best practices using Maximo Manage application and Health Safety and Environmental capabilities.

Sustainability personas
Learn about the Sustainability personas

Environmental Profiles and Emission Sources
Learn about the design concepts on environmental profiles and emission sources.

January 3, 2023

Operational Sustainability Scenarios

mats Sustainability-Designs

In 2022 I delivered vision concept designs with operational sustainability scenarios.

Design Objective

The objective of the Operational Sustainability visioning was to define the strategy, integration, and evolution of the Maximo Application Suite to support a transformationto sustainable operations by identifying corporate and operational sustainability use cases, workflows and data.

“Customers across industries can operationalize sustainability by using Maximo Application Suite to report on environmental impact and manage improvements using their existing asset infrastructure and operational asset management workflows.”

Sustainability Scenarios

Sustainability, Environmental and Operational processes are often to be organized into separate process areas and process owners.

Operational Sustainability Scenarios

Operations teams are responsible for reporting on their activities with impact on Environmental, Social, and Governance factors. Operations teams are also expected to implement and comply with corporate sustainability and environmental strategies and policies, and take corrective actions to reduce environmental impact.

Such activities may be the consumption of energy and material, emissions through combustion and incidents, and waste generated from maintenance. Asset lifecycle presses involve purchasing, supply, transport, storage, usage, and waste management.

Operational sustainability data is recorded and managed at a fine-grained resolution through the operational workflows. The tracking of ESG metrics enables environmental performance analytics and resulting corrective actions to be taken by the operational team at the scale of asset instances and asset classes.

Operational Sustainability Data Sources

Operational data is collected from functional locations and assets identified to have an environmental impact.

High-resolution operational data is required for analytical insights and actions at the asset level. Organizational roll-up of operational data to business units, sites, and locations is required for corporate-level sustainability reporting.

Operational workflows generate operational data. The most important operational sustainability workflows are Incident management, Maintenance management, and Inventory Management. Maintenance management includes Inspections, Conditional and Preventive Maintenance.

Operational data may be collected from continuous, fugitive, or count-based data sources, such as Meters, Inspections, Incidents, Items, and Work Orders. Collected data needs to be quantified by material, amount, and unit of measure. Operational data needs to be normalized to a CO2e unit for use in analytics for asset scripting, prioritization, and baselining at actionable an asset level.

Incident management

An Incident is an unplanned operational event. It may result in a fugitive emission, or a near miss, with an environmental impact on air, water, or ground. Incidents have a workflow that depends on regulatory compliance reporting. Incidents may also trigger a larger Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) workflow with Investigations, Root-cause Analysis, Corrective Actions, and Management of Change.

An Incident workflow is often initiated by an Operator in the control room based on a control system alarm, or by a Technician performing an inspection. Incidents may also be created by workers and managers reporting on an accident.

In the scenario below, the Control Room Operator observes a NOx emission warning on the main boiler plant control panel. The NOx level is at an intermediate warning level and does not exceed regulatory emission limits. An urgent Service Request is submitted, an Incident is reported, and an entry is made in the Operator Log.

The Maintenance Manager receives the Service Request from Operations, recognizes the potential for an emission event, and generates a high-priority Inspection of the boiler control system. The Incident, Service Request, and Inspection objects are linked.

The Technician receives the inspection Work Order on his mobile device. Having been issued a permit to work from Operations he goes to inspect the control system.

The Maintenance Manager reviews the results of the inspection and the near-miss incident updating the Incident Log with the work carried out and referencing the Work Order as a related record to the incident. He then creates an Investigation record from the Incident to analyze the root cause.

Throughout the process, the Incident, Inspection, and Investigation collect emission data attributing the Incident record with sustainability data.

Maintenance management

Asset maintenance is a planned activity that may be periodic, conditional, preventive, or predictive. Maintenance may be performed as inspections where the condition of an asset is inspected and key status and health data are collected.

Maintenance workflows are specified in a Job Plan that calls out the asset data to be collected. Technicians performing the inspection may use a mobile device to record data values or take pictures for visual inspections.

Post-maintenance reviews or analytics of the inspection data may identify outlier behavior indicating an environmentally bad actor.

In the scenario below, the Technician views the monthly HVAC preventive maintenance work order. A monthly maintenance job plan is specifying the inspection and maintenance steps. The job plan states the parts required for the job, such as the HVAC refrigerant type used. The environmental impact of the CO2e of the refrigerant is defined with the Item.

The Technician performs the maintenance, notices the low refrigerant pressure, and refills the HVAC system to the specified operational pressure.

The Maintenance manager reviews the HVAC preventive maintenance work order history. An anomaly in the consumption of refrigerants is identified. An investigation is created to assess the HVAC system as a suspect chronic leaker.

Consumption management

Operational processes drive resource consumption and resulting emissions to air, water and ground.

Installations and Asset maintenance workflows in the Maximo Manage application may include manual steps to collect consumption meter data. The Maximo Monitor application may automate data collection of meter data by device instrumentation or control system integrations.

Enterprise sustainability reporting may demand, or utilize, capturing of consumption data for sustainability disclosure reporting. Data collection may be continuous or manual with monthly meter readings.

Analytics on high-resolution operational consumption data may discover anomalies and bad actors.

In the scenario below, the Technician performs an inspection and captures gas meter reading as gas consumption data. The maintenance manager is analyzing the environmental profile of the boiler and compares its performance with other boilers.

Inventory management

Operational asset management workflows define an asset lifecycle across production, delivery, commissioning, storage, use, decommissioning, recycling and waste.

Asset maintenance may replace the entire rotating asset or parts of the asset. Operational assets may consume resources that need to be replaced or refilled. All such parts and consumables are managed as Items of an Item Master. The environmental factors of an item are specified as part of the Item Master.

Items may be recycled back into the site inventory or returned to a waste inventory. The state of an item may be captured by its condition code.

Conclusions

Data is the currency for sustainability. It’s imperative to enable the collection of quantifiable data from a wide range of operational sustainability workflows and data sources

Operational Sustainability data capture workflows are performed by roles using the Maximo Manage and Maximo Mobile applications to inspect assets, perform maintenance work, or report incidents.

Operational Sustainability data needs to be collected and analytics insights generated at the actionable asset level. Operational data needs to be normalized to CO2e for comparable analytics and environmental scoring.

December 29, 2022

Strategic Research on Weather and Climate Risks

mats Sustainability-Research

In 2021 I performed strategic research on Weather and Climate impact on organizations with asset intense operations using predictions on weather and climate to estimate operational risks

Objective

Shorter time-frame extreme weather and longer term climate change have a major effect on Operations. Organizations are using predictions on weather and climate to estimate operational risks.

The design objective of this research was to perform research across environmental, climate, and sustainability topics across executing and operational roles to identify risks in operations.

The expected outcome was to
Identify a short list of operational high-impact climate risks.
Identify primary industries with operational high-impact climate risks.
Operational success factors, product needs, and value proposition.
Synthesize research outcomes into strategies for sustainability strategies.

Industries

Insurance

Insurance companies are highly impacted by extreme weather conditions increased by climate change.

Cyclones, Storms, and Winds
Hail, Flood, and Fire
Earthquakes and Tsunamis

Insurance companies need predictions on extreme weather events to predict cash flow from Cost, Rates, Claims, Expenses, and Cash settlements with insurance customers. Products need to support weather, risk, and impact predictions, integrate with emergency authorities, and evacuation zones from wildfires, floods, cyclones, and drill into customer evacuation information.

“We need predictions on business impact quantification of weather risks, and automation capabilities that lead to an efficient claims-handling process and an enhanced end-to-end customer claims experience.”

Utilities

Utility companies, like power distribution, express their need for

3-day to weekly weather predictions for mobilization of the crew and direct operational work planning.
Seasonal and sub-sessional risk predictions for maintenance planning.
Predictions on # of impacted customers or % of population

The most frequently identified risk parameters on outage and safety are Cyclones, Wind, Wind gusts, % Wind increase, and Lightning. Also causing constraints in transmission capacity. Interviews indicate that Weather is one risk area causing risks for operational incidents and emissions. We are mainly impacted by Storms, Thunderstorms, Long periods of cold, Hurricanes, and Floods. Incident reports are rolled up annually and submitted to governmental authority.

Mining

Mining companies need predictions on

Inversion causing an increase in hazardous dust particles.
Flooding causing damage to open mine pits and raining dams.
Water stress in areas where the water demand exceeds the available amount.
Heat stress in areas where the air temperature, humidity, radiation, and wind speed exceeds a wet bulb globe temperature.

“Extreme weather conditions occur more frequently with higher costs.”

“I use weather predictions when approving production units to go off-line for maintenance.”

“I only care about weather during current shifts.”

“Weather conditions may damage our mine, transportation, energy infrastructure, and equipment, which in turn will disrupt operations.”

Risk Analysis

Many organizations perform longer-term climate risk analysis on their business to quantify climate induced risks on corporate assets.

Climate risk assessments use the IPCC models to create predications up to 2100 using climate scenarios with, for example, a 2.5 – 3Cº global temperature increase scenario (RCP4.5) or a 5Cº increase as a result of a worse-case ‘business as usual’ scenario (RCP8.5).

The models predict Physical and Transition risks

Physical risks

Temperature Extremes
Coastal Flooding
Fluvial Flooding
Droughts
Water stress
Wildfire
Tropical storms

Transition risks

Carbon pricing
Litigation
Technology
Reputation
Market

Climate risk scenarios provide opportunities for organizations to assess risk levels for new financial investments in facilities and asset intense operations.

Conclusions

“Provide a platform for organizations on a sustainability journey that quantifies financial and operational risks to the business from weather and climate change, from today to the end of the century.”

Extreme weather conditions, induced by climate change, are presenting operational risks to almost all industries.

Weather predictions are traditionally used by skilled operational staff to take preventive actions. Requirements on environmental intelligence are to move from weather predictions to quantification of short-time-frame impact to operations and longer-term risk to the asset value.

New climate solutions need to quantify the business impact of weather and climate risks across the asset lifecycle, for example:

Operations shutdown (outage, production loss)
Customer satisfaction (reputation, fines)
Sustainability (incidents, emissions)
Asset value (damage, repairs, property value)

December 3, 2022

Environmental Profiles and Emission Sources

mats Sustainability-Designs

Design Objective

Operational sustainability data sources are generally heterogeneous and require capabilities to be consolidated for viewing, analytics, and data synchronization.

The objective of an environmental profile concept, for environmentally critical assets or functional locations, is to provide a single point of overview to environmental performance. Operations can track environmental performance, like the carbon footprint of individual assets, or relative scores across asset types based on emission sources from related assets. With insights into environmental performance, like carbon footprint, operations can make improvements at an actionable level of granularity and start tracking the environmental impact of change.

The addition of a generic emission source data structure can be designed to include the date, emission types, material types, amount and unit of measure, and other metadata into a single common record of material consumption and emission. Collected data may represent continuous, fugitive, or count-based emissions. Collected data needs to be quantified by date, emitted material, amount, and unit of measure.

The asset or functional location page in the IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) Manage application, can be designed to provide an environmental tab with all environmentally related data. Using a tabular view of assets and functional locations, a relative sustainability score can be provided in a sustainability column.

Environmental Profiles

An environmental profile object structure can be designed and delivered as a sustainability industry solution, extending the standard views of assets and functional locations. Such an environmental profile presents all environmental emissions related to an asset or a functional location.

Using the environmental profile metadata, a tabular view may be designed to support use-cases for manual filtering and sorting, or automatic queries, providing insights into the environmental characteristics. Such insights may be of any type, trend, or outlier emission of an asset or location. AI models may use environmental profile data as a feature for asset health, sustainability scoring, or asset maintenance strategies.

As the sustainability reporting tool focuses on emissions at selected site-level locations and monthly data aggregations, the environmental profile provides emission data at the fine-grained actionable source level of assets, parts, locations, and functional sub-locations.

Emission Sources

An emission source is a fine-grained atomic unit of emission data. It unifies the data schema for types of emission workflows, like meters, inspections, incidents, and work orders.

An emission source captures the metadata needed to record an emission, such as the type of material, amount, unit of measure, and time-stamp information. Collected emission data may be continuous, fugitive, or count-based. The emission source data is normalized to a Carbon dioxide equivalent value (CO2e) using the emission factor of the material type.

An emission source is generic and is associated with a parent object that defines the context, for example, a meter, incident, or work order. The parent object is related as part of an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) workflow that relates the emission source to an asset or a functional location. The environmental profile hence is designed to become the collection of associated emission source objects of an asset or a functional location.

Meters

Asset Meters and Location Meters represent instances of meter types with manual or automatic meter readings, for example, gas, water, or power consumption.

Meters may capture the meter reading as an emission source object. Inspection workflows will schedule technicians to perform asset inspections with meter readings.

IoT Devices

The IBM MAS Manage application provides high-resolution streaming real-time data from connected devices and control systems. Data is provided in device messages with alphanumeric value types. Device data may be captured as an emission source object.

Inspections

Inspections represent a periodic manual asset or functional location inspections performed by technicians. An inspection is performed following a job plan with many inspection steps, including the sampling of asset data. Some sampled data may be of direct environmental significance or may be input to asset health models that provides a sustainability health score. Planning maintenance using health scores may prevent environmental incidents or drive replacement and improvement programs.

Inspections and resulting data are associated with the inspected assets. Inspections may result in meter readings. Inspection data may also be captured as an emission source object.

Incidents

Incidents are unexpected and unplanned events with health, safety, and environmental impact as fugitive emissions. An incident is recorded as one or more incident events each documenting a specific aspect of the incident, such as an environmentally impactful leak or spill of material.

The type, severity, and classification of the event are documented as an emission source object. Incidents related to an asset or functional location context and the emissions from the incident contribute to the environmental profile.

Work Orders

Work Orders are planned asset maintenance activities across the lifecycle of the asset. Such maintenance includes for example repairs, part replacements, and refilling of consumables. The parts or consumables are referred to as Items.

A Work Order is tracking metadata related to the activity such as transportation and use of items. Replacement and disposal of parts may be used for accounting for the carbon footprint of items. Refilling consumables may be an indicator of abnormal consumption or leak. The environmental impact of the Work Order and Items may be captured as a sequence of emission source objects across the asset lifecycle.

Environmental Profile Information Model

The environmental profile and emission source objects unify the operational sustainability information.

The environmental profile information model.

Concept Design

Design pages have been explored providing a user experience for creating emission sources using the environmental workflows.

Meter design

The Asset and Location Meters are extended with the emission source data like source type, source category, source impact, and material. The meter readings, in source material units, are transformed into CO2e units.

Asset and Location Meters concept design.

Incident design

The Incident Events are extended with the emission source data like source type, source category, and source impact. There is no metering on the incident emissions and a list of emitted material, amount, and unit of measurement is entered. The environmental impact from the incident is aggregated to the CO2e unit.

Incident and Incident Event concept design.

Item Master design

HVAC assets consume refrigerants. Performing maintenance on an asset will inspect the compressor refrigerant pressure. A leak may require a refrigerant refill. The work order will include the service items and the actual usage will be recorded when closing the work order. An emission source can be created using the consumed material and the equivalent CO2e units.

Item Master concept design.

Asset Environmental Profile design

Environmental sources are traceable from the related asset or locations. The tabular view allows filtering by type, category, and other metadata for analysis of performance.

Asset Environmental Profile concept design

Assets Environmental Score design

Assets of the same or comparable types can be listed with sustainability scores normalized by asset performance KPIs.

Asset Environmental Score concept design.

December 2, 2022

Strategic Research on Sustainability

mats Sustainability-Research

In 2022 I performed strategic research on Sustainability in asset-intense industry operations and solution strategies for operational sustainability.

Enterprise Importance of Sustainability

Companies

Globally, major corporations to small companies are looking to become more sustainable, to reduce their environmental impact while remaining competitive. Companies are being held responsible for all Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) aspects of their supply chains and operations.

Investors

Sustainability and ESG have also become topics in the trend toward responsible investing. Investors are increasingly using sustainability scores and ESG metrics to evaluate potential investments given the promise of higher returns. This has pressured companies to be responsible with their resource allocation, strategic in their decisions, and transparently report their sustainability disclosures.

Se IBM ESG reporting on www.ibm.com/impact.

Policy and Regulation

Global policies and regulations have increasingly aligned with international commitments toward ESG. The UK has established an environmental and sustainability policy that allocates resources and staff toward implementing established measures for ESG practices. The European Union (EU) has been a global leader in enacting ESG regulations, making clear that sustainable development will be an utmost priority in its decisions. It presents a holistic approach to the United Nations’ (UN’s) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development across member states, with clear measures coming from the European Council and European Parliament and budget allocations toward these goals.

Customers

As companies are becoming increasingly customer-centric as part of their competitive strategy, customers are increasingly demanding sustainable products and services. This strengthens the brand and reputation of companies with transparent supply chains that can guarantee fair labor practices and environmentally friendly operations. In an unprecedented way, customers now have a voice that can influence management decisions through their buying power.

International Community

With the global consensus brought about by the UN SDGs and the initiatives they have prompted, the international community has become a powerful force to mobilize funds and enhances cross-sector agreements for the implementation of cross-cutting ESG initiatives.

Sustainability maturity

Sustainability maturity levels.

Organizations are initially in a Compliance stage, reporting on mandatory regulations using manually collected data, often challenged by data at scale and low quality. Actions are taken to start collecting environmental impact operational data from existing environmental critical assets and operational workflows.

Most organizations move to an Optimization stage, with a defined sustainability strategy, and started taking optimizing actions by defining goals, monitoring targets, running conservation projects, and acting on KPIs based on data analytic insights. Actions are taken to identify and act on bad environmental actors and start operational change programs to improve carbon footprint through emissions, consumption, sourcing, and waste in operations by environmentally impactful assets and workflows.

Some organizations transition into an Innovation stage, with investments in product and service innovation or a sustainable business transformation. New products are created through a holistic sustainability viewpoint across supply, operations, and product delivery.

Sustainability, Environmental and Operational Processes

Sustainability, Environmental and Operational processes are often to be organized into separate process areas and process owners.

Sustainable enterprise processes, owned by the corporate sustainability function, including definition and management of sustainability goals, metrics, and reporting. Strategies are defined at the corporate level and reported using sustainability disclosures and standards. The granularity of goals and metrics is by year, using a base year, target year, and trends per year. Metrics are decomposed and reported by the significant regions or lines of business. ESG metrics are given in absolute and relative terms often using a coarse-grain classification of emission sources and types significant to the industry.

Environmental processes are owned by Safety and Environmental corporate functions and the Operations business units. In the Safety and Environmental corporate functions, we find process owners as the environmental manager managing environmental policies, goals, impact, permits, consents, and compliance. The environmental manager also manages incident investigations and resulting changes to operational and environmental processes. The focus is set on optimizing the performance of environmentally critical assets and identifying outliers across instances and operational types of locations and assets.

Operations teams are responsible for implementing and complying with environmental policies on incidents with environmental impact, taking corrective actions, and reporting on environmentally impactful operational activities. Such activities may be the consumption of energy and material, emissions through combustion and incidents, and waste generated from maintenance. Asset lifecycle presses involve purchasing, supply, transport, storage, usage, and waste management.

The fine-grained data managed in operations are synchronized with synchronized management systems and reported through sustainable enterprise processes.

Design Considerations

“Provide a platform for organizations on a sustainability journey to report on environmental impact and manage improvements using their existing asset infrastructure and operational asset management workflows.”

Organizations seek to

Establish a corporate sustainability baseline.
Execute a corporate sustainability strategy and meet targets.
Maximize asset service life and reduce environmental impact.

Sustainability, Environmental and Operational processes have specific objectives. The outcomes of these processes are coupled. Workflows are connected, and workflow data is shared.

Operational data at the asset level is required for operational sustainability workflows to be actionable.
Operational processes generate rich, diverse, high-speed, and high-resolution data.
Only environmentally significant operational data needs to be selected for sustainability analytics and reporting workflows.
Granularity of operational data can, should, and will be lost as data is aggregated and synthesized moving into sustainability workflows.

November 24, 2022

Visioning design practice

mats Design-Methods, IBM Design

Visioning is a time-boxed design activity answering questions on strategy, approach, and experience and coming to a shared understanding of strategic objectives.

Introduction

Visioning projects are identified in a roadmap backlog and define the WHY and WHAT to build, but not HOW to build it. Visioning should define the strategy, ask and answer questions, and explore possibilities. Visioning ensures a shared understanding across stakeholders and sponsors.

Visioning precedes concepting and implementation, with the objective to produce hills and epics for the product roadmap backlog.

Visioning projects are led by a senior designer or strategist, working in a core team across leaders of design, product, development, and research. A wider team of stakeholders, sponsors, and SMEs are providing guidance, and feedback, continuously or at playbacks.

Visioning uses market and user research, competitive analysis, ideation, and alignment workshops. Visioning also makes the strategy tangible through conceptual prototypes. Information and data architectures are ways to structure workflow experiences.

The vision projects preferably use agility, by working in sprints or workflow models, addressing objectives and questions in order. The team engages sponsors continuously, or through sprint playbacks.

Smaller vision projects may run for 3 sprints, larger projects may run for a quarter or two. The project ends with a Playback Zero stating the unity of the core team and sponsors on the resulting Hills and Epics in the roadmap.

Vision backlog

Visioning is a part of the product and portfolio roadmapping process.

Product initiatives are created by product management and form the bridge between our strategy and work as a ranked backlog. Some initiatives may require strategic research or visioning, and are tracked as a visioning activity in the backlog. These initiatives may lack clarity or alignment of intent and strategy in the evolution of the product or portfolio.

During monthly reviews, the vision backlog is reviewed, prioritized, and vision projects are initiated based on size, scope, and available resources.

Figure. Vision backlog process.

Types of vision project

There are different kinds of Visioning projects. Here are a few example types:

Exploratory vision projects take a more strategic research perspective with activities on competitive research, user research, concept testing and hill writing. The outcomes may be a strategic North Star vision, and demonstrations of key experiences.
Strategy and alignment vision projects take a more collaborative perspective with alignment workshops that unify the team around the roadmap direction. The outcomes may be more informative with hills, storyboards, and delighter and satisfier experiences.
Experience definition vision projects take a more concepting perspective that drives end-to-end flows and MVP experiences. The outcome is the product-level personas, hills, to-be storyboards, and resulting information architectures.

Defining a vision project

A good practice is to ‘Start with the end in mind’.

Start by understanding the objectives to meet and the questions to answer. The product management function is responsible for the roadmap strategy and defines the vision project. Make sure the vision definition is well-formed and has a clear ‘done criteria’. If the vision definition is not well-formed, use a Sprint 0 and an alignment workshop to get input from multiple sources for the definition. Use voting or prioritization methods to resolve conflicts.

Use a vision project template to ensure well-formed definitions.

Team

Exploration Lead: [Name of sponsor/main owner]
PM: [Name]
Design: [Name]
Development: [Name]

Timeline

Visioning and research: [Target date]
Estimated date for concepting: [Target date, likely at the quarter level]
Estimated date for delivery: [Target date, likely at the quarter or half level]

Problem Framing

[Short 1-2 paragraph ‘setting the scene’ statement that provides context for the problem this project will solve.]

Problem description

[List the problems that our customers and their users are facing that this vision project would seek to better understand and set a direction for solving.]

Visioning Goal

A visioning cycle would help us understand:
[List]

Desired Deliverables

[Eg: Competitive design analysis, Finalize persona research for X, As-is flow including screenshots, User research with X type of users to understand pain points and needs when Y, Design led workshop with X users, Prioritization of goals that X users are trying to solve, To-be story-boarding of UX journey, etc]

Questions to Answer

[Eg: What tools are X users using today to make decisions? and how closely are these tied together? and where are there gaps?]

Target Users

[Eg: Administrators, Operators, Technicians]

Example Customers/BPs

[List customers and partners that the team can use as examples, and/or perform validation & research on for this project].

Risks

[Outline risks faced if this visioning does not happen or is not successful]

Suggested/Expected Activities

[Eg: Visioning kickoff with stakeholders to align Opportunity challenge & Visioning mission, Research with X users from target customers identified by PM, etc]

Resources

[List any helpful resources or reading that may support or inform the vision project.]

Competitors

[List]

Reference Materials

[List any helpful resources or reference materials that may support or inform the vision project.]

Leading a vision project

Vision project are advised to use agile principles. By working in sprints the core team addresses objectives and questions in order and stay focused on a smaller set of questions while continuously making process and receive feedback to validate outcomes. Plan the sprint with clear objectives. End the sprint with a playback to sponsors. Declare the objectives for next sprint. And end the vision project with a Playback Zero stating the unity of the core team and sponsors. Set an expectation on project end date and playback zero.

Agree at start of the meeting cadence of core team meeting and playbacks. Work continuously in the core team, by meeting every or every second day. No less than weekly. Be sensitive to core team workload and other responsibilities. As a vision lead, manage the team calendar and invitations. Keep a backlog list of meeting topics from the sprint objectives. Plan 3-5 meetings ahead, minimally for next meeting.

Forming the vision team

Establish a core team from product PM, design, development, and key Subject mater experts (SMEs), to minimize knowledge transfer and enable rapid decisions. Work close in a 3-in-a-box.

Form a sponsor team with related Product Managers, Design leads, Development leads, and Architects, Technical and User Research, SMEs, and Executive sponsors.

Start the project with a 30 min Vision Project Kick-off with the core and extended team focusing on the project objectives and expected outcome. On indications that the objective is not well-formed or agreed, add a Sprint 0 to reach unity on the definition. Use a vision project kick-off template to guide at the first visioning team meeting, including Objectives, Preliminary hill, Questions, Project plan dates, Vision team and Stakeholders.

Perform competitive analysis

At the start, create an understanding of the bigger business context by analyzing the market and competitors. In cases where the market is less understood, start with a Strategic Research project.

In the competitive analysis

Research competitive solutions.
Compare solution capabilities.
Identify, list, and rank gaps.
Align insights with strategy.
Identify requirements and epics.

Running the vision project

Be artifact driven

Collect and share visioning artifacts

Quickly pull together information from multiple sources to feed innovation
Use collaboration tools for quick information collection, discussions, and documentation
Accelerate team sharing and learning
Accelerate decisions to a shared direction

Be design experience driven

Collect, classify and organize product screens by comparative capabilities

Analyze common patterns
List and rank experiences
Identify opportunities for reuse
Add to requirements, strategy and epics

Use scrapbooking

Use Mural for rapid design and scrapbooking

Quickly pull together page designs from existing and new concepts and patterns in bits and pieces
Playback purpose, scenario, concept, ideas, and experience
Capture quick feedback for the next iteration

Use information modeling

Model artifacts and relationships

Explore data and workflows in scenarios
Create information models with artifacts and relationships
Extend models across products and portfolios
Identify system or record
Prototype experiences and points of integration
Add to strategy and epics

Be test driven

Test early and often. In vision projects, one decision leads to next decisions in a dependency chain. Early testing at playbacks allows for early validation and changing of direction before spending too much time in a chain of decision dependencies.

Seek continuous feedback
Use rapid prototyping, like scrapbooking, for rapid daily validation
Use scenario flow prototypes for sprint playback

Manage the vision content

Be document driven. Document the strategy through hills, concepts, prototypes, and epics in the backlog. Express vision in the staged release plan.

Be formal in the management of content. The material assembled and produced will be your legacy to any following concepting and implementation workstreams. Do not leave all insights only in the head of the core team. Document the details of the vision outcome for new teams concepting and implementing the vision.

Use corporate collaboration tools.

Create a Slack channel for team collaboration. Start with the core team and grow to the extended team after sprint 0.
Create a Mural room for visioning activities. Consider a private Mural room or sub-folders to control open and confidential material.
Create a Box project folder for all project files.

Suggested box folder structure:

/vision-name
   /PLAN
   /MEETINGS
   /PLAYBACKS
   /DESIGN
   /MURAL
   /PROTOTYPES
   /RESEARCH
   /REQUIREMENTS
   /CONCEPTS
   /RELATED

Conclusions on best practices for visioning

Best of luck with your vision projects!

Remember to

Manage a backlog of visioning projects
Start with well-formed visioning questions to answer
Establish a core team from product PM, design, development
Use agility and work in sprints with playbacks
Prototype and show, don’t tell
Look for reusable patterns
Validate early and often with stakeholders and sponsors
Conclude with a Playback 0 unifying the team on hills and epics, and concepts.

January 17, 2022

IBM Design kicks off the New Year with Three Spark Design Awards

mats Awards, Monitor-Awards

January 1, 2022

Lig

mats Design Portfolio

IoTEdge-GwType_1

Image 1 of 6

IoT Platform Developer Experience
Design research on the developer experience in the Watson IoT Platform.

November 26, 2021

Sustainability Personas

mats Sustainability-Research

In 2021 and 2022 I performed strategic, user, and persona research on climate and sustainability for operational sustainability capabilities in IBM sustainability solutions.

This article overviews design research on the sustainability and operations manager personas.

Evolution of the Sustainability Officer Role

The role of the sustainability officer has significantly changed over the last few years. Looking 20+ years back, the sustainability officer was funding and overseeing profile corporate projects on sustainability and social responsibilities.

Over the last few years, the role has evolved, significantly, at a wildfire pace. The sustainability officer is no longer an environmentalist, and a ‘tree-hugger’. The sustainability officer has become a strategic executive at the corporate level. The role is now important to corporate finances, investors, and shareholders. And more externally exposed through transparency to corporate sustainability strategies, objectives, and disclosed key results.

The sustainability role is now integrated with the executive team and part of the inner executive board, and working alongside the CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, CDO. Sustainability responsibilities are aligned with finance, money, market share, corporate survival, and business (re-)innovation.

Sustainability Organisation

The sustainability officer is leading a corporate function with an inner core team of up to 10 team members.

Team members are

Manager of sustainability.
Experts in data acquisition, data analytics, and sustainability reporting.
Experts in environmental, social, and governance topics.
Experts in governmental regulations.
Experts in physical climate risks and transitional business risks.
Experts in industry-specific sustainability topics like; emissions, circularity, forestry, mining, and energy production.

The team is supported by other corporate functions, increasing the extended team to 10s to 100s contributors

Finance and Marketing.
Data and IT.
Technology and Engineering.
Health, Risk, Safety, Environmental, and Compliance.
Procurement and Distribution.
Operations.
And industry-specific functions like Finance; Mortgage, Residential, Commercial, Loans, and Investments.

The Sustainability Officer

Kristina, the Sustainability Officer persona

Devices

10+ years of experience

Also known as: Chief Sustainability Officer, CSO, Sustainability Manager

Master degree – Sustainable Resource Management, Biochemistry, Chemical engineering

Sustainability reporting systems and Financial systems, Email, SMS

Responsibilities

The sustainability officer is responsible for

Leading the sustainability mission and team.
Translating the corporate business strategy to a sustainability strategy.
Establishing principles and targets for implementing the sustainability strategy.
Gathering, defining, and implementing sustainability best practices.
Gathering data for mandatory sustainability disclosures.
Reporting on sustainability KPIs monthly to executive boards.
Reporting through mandatory sustainability disclosures.
Reporting on broad areas of corporate, environmental, conservation, innovation, people, and society goals.
Reporting to investors, analysts, and sustainability rating agencies.
Engage other corporate functions, like operations, environment, and safety.
Engaging operations on sustainability projects implementing corporate targets.

Tasks

The sustainability officer is performing the following tasks

Managing day-to-day sustainability operations.
Educate the board of directors on sustainability.
Educate the organization on corporate sustainability strategies and targets.
Work with internal business stakeholders.
Work with the investor relations team and investors.
Build skills, engagement, and momentum in the organization.
Facilitate strategy meetings, target setting, and LOB conversations.
Facilitate corporate sustainability improvement programs.
Work with operations stakeholders on data collection, processing, and analytics.
Perform data collection, processing, and analytics.
Assemble sustainability KPIs for disclosures.
Ensure audits on sustainability disclosures.
Keeping tabs on sustainability issues.
Perform risk scenario analysis.

Pain-points

The sustainability officer is experiencing the following pain-points

The scale of data and data quality. Often up to 2000+ metrics and associated data sources.
Lots and lots of reporting. Often 20+ assessments and frameworks.
Frequency of changing regulations and standards.
Manual data collection across the corporate, supply chain, and service providers.
Lag of data availability for steering and reporting.
Accessibility to data in (some) global regions.
Difficulties to trace scope 3 emissions back through the chain of suppliers.
Data quality controls to avoid audit failures.
Sustainability auditing as strong as financial auditing.
Ownership and monitoring of improvement programs.
Understand the investor scoring KPIs.
Ability to backcast and forecast KPIs.

“I want to stop reporting and start acting.”

“I’m overwhelmed with investor and analyst questions on our sustainability assessments.”

“I have stopped using the word CLIMATE – Too existential and scary.”

“Regulators and investors are asking for it, customers are demanding it, and employees are expecting it.”

Operations Officer

Greg, the Operations Manager persona.

Greg, the Operations Manager persona

Devices

5-10 years of experience

Graduate or Bachelor degree. Engineering

Maximo Suite, Business Operations systems and Financial systems, Email, SMS

Safety first

Operations have the responsibility to not put the plant, staff, and operations at risk. Balance demand, capacity, and risks to operations.

Priorities are

Safety first.
- Always prioritizing the safety of employees, the local community, and equipment.
Deliver on operational target.
- Optimize performance to deliver on production plan.
- Assess the impact of risk factors on shift operations.
- Mitigate risks to ensure safety.
Ensure rules and regulations are followed
- Record production losses, incidents, and emissions.
- Monitors to stay within emission rights and certificates.
- Tracking emissions down to assets.
- Request new licenses or request production to move to other plants.
- Identify and analyze defects and perform root-cause analysis.
Maintain operational resources
- Predicts consumption demands and maintenance windows for units to go offline.
- Plan and schedule maintenance.
- Plan and schedule operational changes.

Climate

Operational impacts

Production parameters and forecast accuracy; Solar, Cloud coverage, Wind, Hydro.
Impact on demand, price, production load, capacity, transmission, delivery, and plant availability.
Weather forecasts lack integration with operational systems.
Increasing climate-related incidents causing increasing costs.
Unpredictable weather impacts operations from; Hurricanes, Storms, Thunderstorms, Long periods of cold, Floods, Landslides, and Erosion.
Risk of staff safety and disruptions to production.
Lack of interest in unquantified weather risks and proactive risk planning.
Damage to assets, impact to 3rd party, fines, claims, and corporate reputation.
Cost of maintenance, repair, and replacement.
Costs of hardening or moving assets.
Cost and funding for climate scenario analysis.
Climate impact on asset replacement strategies.

Sustainability

Manage operational targets; # emissions, # incidents, # worker injuries.
Manage emission certificates.
Manage carbon performance reporting and audits.
Sustainability reporting of carbon footprint is generally uncommon.
Sustainability data can/is based on operational data in SCADA systems.
Evidence of carbon improvement programs is anecdotal and fragmented.

Needs

Operationalize identification, assessment, and management of climate risks.
Business impact and attention to the weather, environment, and climate conditions as part of existing operational workflows.
Short-term weekly forecasts.
Longer quarterly seasonal predictions.
AI-supported decisions for reliable and predictive operations.

Pain-points

Unplanned downtime and losses in productivity.
Many information sources; views and lack of correlation across production, plan, work orders, operator logs, assets, and risk.
Worker awareness of safety and reporting.
Ensure compliance with regulations and reporting.
Lack of integrated weather risk forecasts.
Too many operator-level alerts and notifications.

“Safety first!”

“Climate conditions can cost us a lot of money and loss of customer satisfaction.”

“Sustainability happens at some other place with some other people.”