Defining Sustainability – a new insight study from
Siemens Financial Services (SFS) – assesses the sustainability-enabling features offered by the global top 50 production machine builders to their manufacturing customers. The assessment is based on the published literature and statements of that top 50 cohort.
The paper helps establish how machine builders are defining the ways sustainability-enablement is being delivered by their solutions. It also pinpoints the sustainability-enabling priorities being promoted by top machine builders — a reflection of the demand coming from the manufacturing sector.
Sustainability features promoted by machine builders range across energy-efficiency, enhanced productivity through digitalisation, low-footprint product development through digital twins, retrofit, through to waste, raw materials, water usage and pollutant reduction. Recognising the need to invest in more sustainable manufacturing machines is one thing. Finding the capital is another — whether entirely new equipment or retrofit modernisation.
Scarce capitalSpecialist financing solutions help machinery and technology equipment vendors sell their more sustainable offering by making it easy for the manufacturer to invest through monthly payments, with no need to find (and tie up) substantial amounts of scarce capital.
Stefania Moruzzi, business development manager - UK Industry and Machine Tools, Siemens Financial Services, said: “There’s now a wide recognition for machine builders to provide sustainability-enabling technology for manufacturers. This is driven by pressures on the manufacturers themselves — through corporate sustainability reporting standards, shareholder pressure, capital markets definitions, and so on. But transition to more sustainable technology comes at a cost, at a time when capital is at a premium. Specialist finance solutions are intelligently designed to provide budget-friendly enablers of the green and sustainable transition — both for machine vendors and for their manufacturing customers.”
Public statements of the global top 50 manufacturing production machine builders (by turnover) were analysed. Specifically, statements about the sustainability enabling features of their machines and solutions were assessed. The analysis produced a series of definitions of sustainability-enabling machine features, along with the proportion of this top machine builder group making each sustainability-enabling claim for their technology and solutions.