Sustainability-Articles

June 25, 2024

Operational Emission Tracking

Introduction

The new emission tracking capabilities in Maximo Application Suite (MAS) 9.0 are the next steps on a sustainability roadmap that we started in the last release of Maximo 8.x. In that release, we used a classification of Locations Meters by Meter groups for Power, Gas, and Water. We also delivered a data connector to the ESG Suite (Envizi) to include data for GHG Scope 1 and 2 reporting from location meters. This first release was mostly delivering business value in the context of corporate carbon reporting.

In the 2024 release of MAS 9.0, we are putting the focus on emission tracking and management from an operational viewpoint. In previous articles on operational sustainability, we concluded that there are both corporate AND operational workflows to track emissions, for complementary reasons.

Operational emissions are key to the corporate emissions reporting. Continuous and fugitive emissions, at the source, both add up into the Scope 1 and 2 CO2e corporate emission reports.
Operational emissions tracking is key to taking corrective actions on operational and environmental procedures, choices of production materials, and emission conservation at the source.

While the ESG Suite focuses on the coarse-grained GHG emissions at a site level, the emission tracking in MAS provides the infrastructure and granularity of the emissions sources by locations and assets, down to the fine granularity of individual meters and incidents.

Objective

We will deliver a Maximo sustainability strategy for customers across industries to report on environmental impact using their existing asset infrastructure and operational asset management workflows.

Record emissions from operations.
Track emission KPIs on the Operational Dashboard.
Report on location emissions data.

User Research

Multiple user research projects were run to identify the business needs and validate the proposed designs. When interviewing Operational, Environmental, and Sustainability managers, we found that:

There are both corporate and operational reasons to track emissions.
Different reporting practices exist across operational teams, as well as across continuous and fugitive emissions.
Organizations need to support emission recording, analysis, mitigation, and reporting workflows.
Organizations need to ensure compliance with environmental emission regulations and health and safety protocols as part of their environmental responsibilities.
Operations continuously need to improve efficiency and reduce operational spend.

Conclusions are that:

The market is moving toward platform-based solutions that deliver a set of core capabilities.
Legacy emissions solutions are narrow in scope or still use spreadsheets and/or regulatory-mandated factors to generalize or infer data, which cannot support current and future requirements.
The gap between ideal environmental ambitions and practical realities presents energy-intensive companies with both existential risks and global opportunities.

Scenario

The end-to-end emission management scenario crosses over multiple operational and environmental roles and workflows.

Emission tracking scenario.

First, emissions may occur in regular operational production and activities. Emissions occur continuously, like in combustion for heat, steam, or power production. The flow of gas, oil, or other fuel material is measured by meters and may be reported through inspections by technicians. Emissions may also be unplanned and fugitive. A leak may be detected by the control system and recorded as an incident by operations, or as an inspection by a technician.

Emission data is recorded as part of the operational business object; as a meter reading for continuous emissions or an incident for fugitive emissions. Emission records may be reported as an Emission Profile in the context of the reported location of the emissions. The emission data recorded is continuously added for ESG reporting on actuals and sustainability targets.

The Environmental Officer is tracking emission KPIs on the Emission Management dashboard. Corrective actions based on emission-driven KPIs may be to plan an investigation to identify root causes and suggest actions or operational changes.

An emission management dashboard is provided out-of-the-box. MAS 9.0 improves the operational dashboard and supports the creation of multiple public and private dashboards. The Emission Management dashboard is just a new public board created with emission tracking cards connected to KPIs in Maximo KPI Manager.

Users can add new KPIs and edit, clone, or create emission dashboards for personal or shared use.

Design

Meters

A location meter is an instance of a meter (type) related to a location. A location has 0..n location meters. Some of the definitions of the meter are delegated to an instance of a meter, either a location meter or an asset meter. For example, a GAS meter may be a common type for meters that measure Biogas, Natural Gas, Methane, ?Gasoline, or LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas). Hence, the material/emission measured by the meter and the unit of measure is defined by the location (and asset) meter, not by the meter type.

With emission tracking, new emission details are added to the location meter record, including the emission type, category, and impact. Also, the emission/material is defined for the location meter. The definitions and values for the emission details are consistent with the incident event design.

Manual meter readings provide new meter values during inspections. The consumption of material is provided as the meter reading. An emission record is created from the meter reading with optional CO2e using the EIS APIs.

Location Meter with emission details.

Incidents and Incident Events

An (HSE) Incident record captures all details of an operational incident. An incident may be of an ENVIRONMENTAL type and may have dependent emission-related details. Other incident types exist that may be used as a class for emissions, such as SPILL and LEAK.

Incident Event types. Emission tracking is using the Environmental type by default.

An incident may have multiple outcomes. There may be damage to equipment like vehicles, to persons like drivers, and there may be multiple types of emissions, like spilled diesel or release of gas. An Incident has 0..n Incident Events to record the decomposition of an incident into separate types of events and their details. For emission tracking, the type to be used is the ENVIRONMENTAL type. The emission detail section on the page is ONLY related to incident events of ENVIRONMENTAL type and should only be shown when this type is selected.

Incident Event with emission details.

Emission Material Classifications and Calculations

All emission tracking scenarios include emissions of some material type. Material is a generalized concept for defining such use of products, formulas, chemicals, solids, fluids, and gases. Each type of material has a corresponding CO2e equivalent, which represents the amount of CO2 creating an equivalent greenhouse impact. The computation that transforms an amount of a material to the equivalent CO2e is called an emission factor calculation.

The material types are predefined by a material classification. The material names and unit of measures are identifiers that may be defined by an Emission Factor calculator API and should be seen as reserved API parameter values.

Emission factor calculators, like the EIS Emission calculator APIs, provide emission factor calculations for a predefined set of material types. The emission material type is used in the Incident, Meter, and Emission Profile pages for the Emission field. The values for Emission, Emission Amount, and Unit of Measure are used as parameters for calls to the emission factor API. The material names and unit of measures are identifiers and should be defined by the emission factor calculator to avoid material identity lookups and transformations.

The GHG protocol requires tracking of 7 greenhouse gases in addition to the CO2e aggregate: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3). The first release of emission tracking only provides a field for a CO2e value.

Emission Reports

The location emission profile is a summary of the emissions from sources associated with the location. This may include incidents and meters. In later releases of Maximo Manage, other sources of emissions may be added to the location emission profile.

New ‘View Continuous Emissions’ and ‘View Fugitive Emissions’ actions are added to the location action list, providing a summary of all continuous and fugitive emissions related to the location, respectively. Using the View Continuous Emissions dialog and View Fugitive Emissions dialog, users can track and analyze the location emissions.

Filter emissions by type, classification, impact, emission/material, or time window.
Export emissions to a CSV file.

Location action to view and report on fugitive emissions at the location.

Location action to view and report on continuous emissions at the location. Emission records may be expanded to view details.

Early designs, not included in the final delivery, suggested a single Environmental tab on Location and Assets form views. The Emissions/Environmental tab on the Location and Asset record lists all emissions related to the location. To track and analyze the location/asset emissions, users can:

Filter the single list view for any emission type and source related to the location or asset.
Expand each individual emission record for details.
Export emissions to a CSV file.

Environmental tab on Location objects aggregating all emissions at the location. (Not included in Maxim0 9.0 release).

Emission Management Dashboard

Maximo Manage is improving the Role-based Dashboard in Maximo Manage 9.0 to support multiple configurable dashboards.
The emission tracking capability will deliver an out-of-the-box Emission Management dashboard with environmental KPIs on emissions, health, and safety, to be used by an Environmental Manager in an operational team.

The KPI tiles are:

SLA compliance: Count of all fugitive incidents with incident events of ENVIRONMENTAL type.
Environmental investigations: Count of ongoing environmental investigations in progress related to an ENVIRONMENTAL-type incident.
Environmental changes: Count of MOC with environmental impact, filtered by investigations caused by an environmental incident.
Overdue environmental critical work: Count of work related to environmental incidents.

A suggested environmental work queue is added to a Work Queue tile:

Overdue emergency environmental work.
Overdue planned environmental work.

Rows are added for Favorites and Quick Actions

Environmental Management operational dashboard with emission tracking KPIs.

Mobile Incident Reporting

The Incident Reporter app in Maximo Mobile supports technicians to report on fugitive emissions directly on-site, without the need for sensors.

A new mobile incident reporting application was designed but not included in the final delivery. The mobile Incident Reporting application use cases should, like the web application, also include all types of incident types, such as injury and illness, security incidents, a near miss, a spillage, a safety observation, or a failure in a safety process.

Maximo Mobile app for emission reporting by technicians.

Business Outcome

On June 25, 2024, IBM announced the availability of the 9.0 release of the Maximo Application Suite. Maximo Manage 9.0 integrates emissions with work management to efficiently track and manage continuous and fugitive emissions while connecting emission reduction efforts with maintenance activities.

Maximo Manage 9.0 builds on a long history of tracking environmentally impactful processes with the introduction of an Emissions Tracking Dashboard within the Health, Safety, Environment, and Oil and Gas offerings to help customers monitor their progress against CO2 reduction targets.

Read more about how to effectively capture and manage a diverse range of operational emissions in a single platform in the IBM Maximo Emission Management report

IBM Maximo Emission Management in the IBM Media Center video.

A Maximo Emission Management session was presented at Maximo World 2024.

Maximo Emission Tracking
Maximo World 2024 session on emission tracking.

IBM Maximo Emissions Management video
IBM Maximo Emissions Management helps environmental managers track and manage their operations’ fugitive and continuous emissions.

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.

Sustainability maturity levels.

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 the assets

Managing environmentally critical assets
Managing environmentally related incidents and corrective actions
Managing and reporting on compliance
Identifying emission sources and registering 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 contributions. 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 an 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.

Learn more about IBM Envizi ESG Suite.

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.

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