Proficy for Sustainability Insights

Sustainability insights refer to meaningful interpretations drawn from data related to the relationships between resource use, environmental impact, and operational efficiency. Understanding these relationships help organizations assess how their activities affect operational productivity and exposure to climate and financial risks. By identifying patterns and trends in energy consumption, emissions, water use, and material efficiency across assets, processes, and facilities, decision-makers can spot inefficiencies, evaluate risks, and prioritize improvements that align with broader organizational goals.

Solutions like Proficy for Sustainability Insights help teams synthesize operational and resource data to generate these insights. By consolidating data and contextualizing key metrics across systems, the software enables organizations to actively manage utilities and resource use, supporting smarter decisions across operations, facilities management, and sustainability programs. This connected view helps teams collaborate more effectively and generate more value from their data. Areas that have the greatest impact become visible with operations context, helping teams focus their limited time and energy on the most meaningful actions. Progress can be tracked in near real time and compared to historical and expected performance, enabling continuous improvement and timely response to deviations which erode profitability and increase resource use.

Businesses can use sustainability insights to pinpoint where resources are being overused or wasted, uncover the root causes of inefficiencies, and identify opportunities for optimization. For example, they might analyze water or electricity consumption by product SKU, production line, shift, or equipment to uncover patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed without such context. Further, by translating plant-floor consumption sources into their respective Scope 1 or Scope 2 GHG impacts, teams have the granularity to actually manage these metrics as operational KPIs rather than strategic organizational indicators.

With timely, contextualized, and high-resolution visibility into resource usage and emissions data, teams can implement targeted changes, such as adjusting operating parameters, shutting down unnecessary equipment, or modifying production schedules, that lower resource consumption without sacrificing performance. These changes can contribute to measurable reductions in environmental impact metrics like water use and operational carbon emissions while also lowering operational costs.

Sustainability insights provide the transparency and traceability organizations need to assess progress against the environmental dimensions of their ESG goals. By consolidating and analyzing data related to emissions, utility usage, and resource intensity, companies can move beyond static reports and gain a dynamic, up-to-date picture of performance over time.

These insights can also help teams prioritize actions, monitor improvements, and support internal and external reporting. With data to back up their efforts, organizations are better equipped to exhibit accountability, address shareholder expectations, and adapt to rapidly evolving regulatory landscapes. Moreover, companies can demonstrate year-over-year improvements and improve their competitive position against peers in the market, which in turn help secure access to capital. This ability to make data-driven adaptations, based on evidence, can be a critical advantage as disclosure standards, shareholder demands, and climate adaption risks continue to grow.

Manufacturing industries with high resource consumption or complex operations—such as consumer packaged goods, metals and material production, food and beverage, chemicals, and water and wastewater—often benefit most from sustainability insights. These sectors typically operate across multiple geographies in sites with multiple processes and/or product SKUs, each with unique resource demands.

By leveraging sustainability insights, organizations in these industries can identify inefficiencies, uncover performance gaps, and standardize best practices across facilities. The ability to benchmark resource use, detect anomalies, and improve operational consistency makes these insights especially valuable in environments where small changes can drive significant cost savings and environmental improvements.

Data analytics is at the heart of turning raw operational data into actionable sustainability insights. It allows organizations to analyze trends, identify correlations, and detect deviations in complex, multivariate processes and across time periods. Contextualized analytics enable more focused action and more effective process management, helping to highlight how resource use changes by shift, operations team, product, batch, or asset. Contextualized analytics help reveal relationships between variables and metrics, helping teams explain what’s driving the variation and pinpoint what to do about it.

Advanced analytics can also support predictive modeling, benchmarking, and what-if scenarios, enabling proactive rather than reactive decision-making. It helps teams anticipate the outcomes of operational changes, compare performance across similar assets or sites, and focus on the most impactful areas. Ultimately, analytics transforms data into a practical tool for continuous improvement, risk management, and informed sustainability strategies.

The specific metrics and KPIs tracked will vary by industry and organizational goals, but common ones include:

- Utilities/resource consumption (e.g., natural gas, diesel, electricity, water, etc.)
- Resource intensity metrics by batch, line, or shift (e.g., kWh per SKU, gallons per batch, etc.)
- Overall energy consumption
- Overall energy intensity (e.g., BTU per run-hour, kJ per unit of production, MMBTU per batch, etc.)
- Carbon emissions, absolute and per unit of production (Scope 1 and 2)

Tracking these metrics over time, especially in connection with production context, helps organizations uncover hidden inefficiencies, validate improvements, and make data-driven decisions that support both operational and environmental goals.

Proficy for Sustainability Insights helps centralize and contextualize these metrics across systems, making it easier for teams to benchmark performance, identify trends, and align resource usage with broader operational strategies. By connecting production data with sustainability goals, this solution supports continuous improvement and more targeted decision-making.