Henkel harnesses its big data to drive sustainability and boost energy efficiency
The German fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) manufacturer Henkel operates globally with more than 52,000 employees. Its brands span three business units: Adhesive Technologies, Beauty Care and Laundry & Home Care. Henkel aims to promote sustainability in all its business activities, reinforcing its leadership position and optimizing its energy consumption.
“We adopted a digital backbone as this facilitates a vertical approach, meaning we can implement any add-on application in a ‘plug-and-play manner’ across the entire global value chain within months. In our experience, this is not only faster (than creating then duplicating a state-of-the art site), but also ensures each application roll-out quickly generates tangible business benefits.”
Dr. Dirk Holbach, Corporate Senior Vice President,
Global Supply Chain Laundry & Home Care, Henkel
Goals
- Reduce specific energy consumption and confirm ISO 50001 certification for all Laundry & Home Care production sites
- Improve supply-chain resource efficiency on the production side by 5-6% annually
- Become three times more efficient by 2030
Challenges
- Improvements were needed in the collection, use and communication of consumption and emissions data across the length of Henkel’s global supply chain
Results
- Solution support for growth and sustainability strategies has resulted in incremental reduced year-on-year energy consumption, by up to 16% in 2020, on top of other on-going reduction measures, such as investing in more sustainable process and automation equipment
- Annual energy cost savings are growing, reaching an incremental €8 million, driven by digital analytics in 2020
- Energy cost savings to date have topped €37 million
- Exponential ROI delivered: full payback delivered within four years; quadrupled ROI after eight years
- Reduction in filling line waste and elimination of all incorrect labeling resulting in 100% label quality
- Improvements of 15% in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) after just two years
