TCS case study

Sustainability Challenges

The client has ambitious Net Zero and circularity goals but faces significant challenges, including:

• Diverse, and fragmented, data spread across individuals, departments, and suppliers.
• High data acquisition costs, with most data collected and shared manually.
• Need for deep subject matter expertise to interpret sustainability data, limiting broader team participation in decision making.
• Outdated datasets offering a retrospective view rather than real-time, forward-looking modelling for strategic decisions.
• The client’s energy-related data points were isolated and disconnected, preventing continuous control of energy usage and carbon emissions across scopes 1, 2, and 3 to track performance. Additionally, product life cycle assessments were limited and conducted as one-off exercises.

Solution

End to End Sustainability solution covering energy management, product life cycle assessment, Circularity and ESG reporting.

The project integrates billions of data points from complex value chains to support short- and long-term Net Zero goals. Key innovations include:

• Mining Existing Data: Utilizing existing systems and applications to gain deep insights into the full life impacts of clients manufacturing sites and its respective products.
• Speed and Scale: Delivering LCA results for multiple products simultaneously and in detail, enabling robust decision-making.
• Strategic Approach: Using AI/ML, digital twins, and industry-tuned models to perform multi-dimensional simulations, allowing decision-makers to test future options across value chains before making

Results

TCS implemented an energy management platform at the client’s site, that has seen client installing 800 new energy meters and creating 2,500 production data points in a single plant. This consolidated all energy data into one visualization suite with automatic alerts. TCS’ EM platform provided a connected energy view, integrating disparate systems and energy metering data with AI and ML capabilities for simulations and forecasting. This helped identify energy wastage across site operations, manufacturing processes, and building assets.

The project also enabled the client to monitor its performance against its Science Based Target and conducted full LCA for  specified products produced on-site, at the product, part, materials, and life cycle stage level.

The solution significantly reduced the client’s carbon footprint and streamlined maintenance activities using real-time performance data, saving on maintenance resources and capital-intensive asset replacements. It also helped prioritize efforts by identifying emission hot spots. The client used the gathered data to model and optimize Net Zero delivery scenarios.

Key takeaways

The project impacted every part of the client’s value chain, complicating sponsorship and budget allocation. To address this, we formed a multi-stakeholder group from various client functions and suppliers to understand their needs, ensure a unified approach, and provide robust governance. We created this group early and engaged it frequently, though in hindsight, we should have formed it even earlier.