Digitalization as a Driver for Sustainability
In the third episode of Business on Air, we are excited to invite Giuliana Auinger, a Vice-President at Schneider Electric, and Billy Lai, Deputy Director (Knowledge Solutions), SGS Hong Kong Limited, two companies that offer sustainability solutions, to discuss the biggest issues Hong Kong companies face around sustainability.
Learn more about:
- What businesses can do to advance their sustainability goals
- Data and digitalization as key to helping companies on their sustainability journey
- How the implementation of the 3Rs together with technology can help your organization
Giuliana Auinger, Vice-President at Schneider Electric
Billy Lai, Deputy Director (Knowledge Solutions), SGS Hong Kong Limited
Q: What are the 3Rs, and why are they essential for organizations to achieve sustainability?
Microsoft: The following 3Rs are crucial and go hand-in-hand to provide a clear, precise and accurate plan of action for your sustainable agenda:
Record. We believe that businesses need data to understand how much carbon they are emitting today. Data is needed to inform decision making.
Report. More and more companies are issuing sustainability reports. In Hong Kong, listed companies are required to file an ESG report. This gives you data-driven insights on how you can reduce emissions, based on what you have recorded.
Reduce. This is the most important part. Once we have the data and reports to provide insights on areas of focus, action is needed to reduce emissions.
Q: How do Schneider Electric and SGS model sustainability? What solutions and technology can SGS and Schneider Electric offer to help customers achieve sustainability?
SGS: Sustainability is one of our business principles. As of today, we are providing a broad range of solutions to help customers implement sustainability in their own organization and across the supply chain. We categorize our solutions into six sustainability pillars: Those related to natural resources, energy, production, infrastructure, living and business practice.
Schneider Electric: We have had sustainability embedded in our business for more than a decade. The goal is to empower everyone to make the most of energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability.
Microsoft: At Microsoft, we use the three Rs, which we define as Record, Report and Reduce, to guide our customers on their sustainability journey with our cloud solutions. We announced our sustainability commitment in 2020 to becoming a carbon negative, water positive and zero waste company by 2030.
Q: What challenges are companies encountering when they come to implement the 3Rs?
SGS:
- Recording data is a challenge since it can be difficult and time-consuming to collect the data and ensure its integrity.
- There are increasing demands to report data openly and transparently. Some reporting, like EMSD, is mandatory.
Q: What can companies do to reduce their environmental impact?
Schneider Electric: We believe there are four levers that every corporation can pull in order to reduce their impact on the environment.
- First, they need to electrify their operations.
- The second lever to pull is to reduce energy use.
- The third lever is to replace all your energy sources with renewable energy.
- The last lever relates to scope 3: you need to engage your entire value chain to ensure that they are on the same decarbonization journey that you are.
SGS: We suggest our clients to centralize their supply network instead of maintaining a global supply chain with the need for a lot of ocean transportation, and consolidate their material suppliers. Shortening the distance can significantly reduce the supply chain carbon footprint.
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