How NTT’s new SaaS offer can help industry achieve net zero

As industry struggles to accelerate its sustainability journey amid looming 2050 net zero goals, NTT steps up with an industry-focused solution.

The global IT infrastructure and services company has launched the industry’s first full-stack Sustainability as a Service (SaaS) offering – designed to help manufacturing, transportation and other industries reduce the environmental impact of business activities.

This comes as GHG emissions continue to climb across all sectors, most rapidly in transport and industry, with the latter accounting for a quarter of global emissions, according to the IPCC.

Challenges persist as industry targets 2050 net-zero goals

Organisations are increasingly being held accountable for achieving net-zero goals to meet the expectations not just of stakeholders, including clients, shareholders, institutional investors, employees, business partners, and communities – but also, governments with many countries already legislating their commitment to emissions reduction.

Forward-looking businesses are anticipating those regulations by committing to net zero targets before 2050, with a recent survey revealing that 58% of Fortune 500 companies aim to reduce GHG emissions and achieve net-zero goals by 2050 or sooner.

But given the complexity and scale of the challenge, not all businesses have the basis to move towards net zero at the necessary pace, and many are lagging.  

Those that commit are often faced with additional challenges of being under-resourced and underfunded or are unable to consistently capture accurate data fit for purpose.

Recent research from Microsoft UK found that, despite strong ambitions, almost 3 in 4 UK manufacturers (74%) are struggling to back up their climate commitments with tangible reductions in their carbon footprint.

The IPCC has determined that a key challenge for the industry sector is the uncertainty, incompleteness, and quality of data on energy use and costs – a challenge even more pronounced for scope 3 emissions as manufacturers will need data to set clear targets and standards for their suppliers, partners, and customers.

How NTT’s SaaS solution can deliver a customised solution for industry

This is where NTT is hoping to change the game – with an innovative offering designed to help industry achieve better economic performance through enhanced climate action including measuring, monitoring, and reporting impact.

The new full-stack SaaS platform will help “organisations proactively limit climate incidents, respond in real-time with automated resolutions, and accurately measure their environmental impact in communications with regulators, employees and other stakeholders,” says Devin Yaung, Group SVP of Enterprise, IoT Products and Services at NTT Ltd.

The full stack offering – combining extensible technologies leveraging NTT’s solution building blocks including IoT, Private 5G, Edge Compute, NTT Smart Solutions Platform, Digital Twins and ML products – comes with a consulting service designed to be customised depending on net-zero goals, the organisation, and the supply chain’s carbon-producing footprint.

The Japanese technology giant claims it will help companies build a comprehensive picture of the status of climate goals by streamlining the monitoring, measurement, and reporting of emissions, and will also speed up incident response times to get to the root cause of an issue.

Offering real-time visibility into carbon footprint and net-zero progress

As a global leader in tire and rubber manufacturing, Nizar Trigui, CTO of Bridgestone America, says “having real-time visibility into carbon footprint and progress towards net-zero ambitions is an essential foundation of our growth and innovation agenda.”

And NTT’s platform offers this. Using NTT’s IoT for sustainability solution, the platform offers Remote Environmental Monitoring, which uses sensors to identify the presence of pollutants in the air, water, and plants across the globe, in real-time.

In manufacturing, this can assist with measuring processes and products that consumer energy, while in the transportation industry, it can monitor GHG emissions more effectively for fleet management.

The offering also uses a combination of NTT Smart Solutions and Digital Twin capabilities, giving organisations the ability to predict issues with the built-in ML technology, respond to incidents faster with context from Digital Twin, and measure the carbon footprint at a granular, actionable level, in real-time.