FLSmidth plans industry-wide sustainability transformation and looks to Microsoft solutions for help

A broad vision of sustainability

At FLSmidth, sustainability is about more than carbon emissions, waste, and water—it’s about people. “The first goal of sustainable development is to lift people out of poverty,” says Wouter de Groot, Head of Marketing and Sustainability at FLSmidth. “As their standard of living improves, the demand for metals and cement increases, so it is essential that we produce those materials in a more responsible way. Sustainability is no longer just part of our business; it is our business.”

FLSmidth is in a unique position to make a difference in the world’s sustainability efforts. The company delivers engineering, equipment, and service solutions for the mining and cement industries, which together produce 10 to 12 percent of global carbon emissions. With its MissionZero sustainability program, FLSmidth aims to make its own operations in both mining and cement industries carbon neutral by 2030 and provide the tools to help its customers do the same. 

“Our promise is that we will make technology available by 2030 that will enable our customers to build zero-emissions mining and cement plants,” explains Mikko Tepponen, Chief Digital Officer and Group Executive Management member at FLSmidth. “The equipment used in these plants can last for 40 years or more, so we must act now to make a difference in the decades to come before the old, inefficient ways are locked into place. By better understanding our sustainability data now, we can improve our emissions and resource usage with current equipment immediately, and then build on those savings with future equipment and service releases.”

FLSmidth is working closely with customers on all of its MissionZero efforts, and an important part of the project is helping customers see why sustainability is not just good for the planet, it’s good for their businesses as well. “Reducing power, reducing water usage, and reducing waste produce tangible bottom-line savings,” says Tepponen. “They can even create new business opportunities—if plants can run with much less water, for example, they can be located in areas that haven’t had the resources to support them before.”

Beyond just boosting the bottom line, a commitment to sustainability may be required for industries like mining and cement to stay in operation. “Regulators, investors, and society at large just won’t continue to accept the emissions associated with our industries today,” says de Groot. ”It won’t be very long in the future before companies will start to lose their licenses to operate if they don’t get their operations in order.”

The right tools for working with sustainability data

FLSmidth knows that it can’t improve something it can’t measure, so the company sees a need for solutions like Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to establish emissions baselines for its operations, set incremental goals, and track progress toward MissionZero. Cloud for Sustainability brings together a suite of Microsoft cloud technologies including Microsoft Sustainability Manager, an extensible solution that enables organizations to more easily record, report, and reduce their environmental impact through increasingly automated data connections that deliver actionable insights.

“With the help of Microsoft and its powerful sustainability solutions, we have an opportunity to better organize and understand our data which will help us deliver on our sustainability ambitions in mining and cement,” says de Groot. “We can develop dashboards to gain a live image of our overall performance, streamline our reporting, and view data down to the product level and site level. With that data, we can make our current products more efficient, design better products for the future, and accelerate our path toward MissionZero.”

The value in the relationship between FLSmidth and Microsoft goes beyond just the technology involved. “It’s easy for us to work with a company like Microsoft because we share ambitions and values around sustainability,” says de Groot. “Microsoft wants to help everyone reach their full potential through technology, and that’s what we want for our customers.”

de Groot also believes that customers will be more excited to work with FLSmidth because of the collaboration. “Microsoft is a name our customers know and trust,” he says. “What we can offer together by co-innovating with Microsoft is better than what we could provide on our own.”

Tepponen recognizes similar benefits in the alignment between the two companies. “Microsoft is the technology expert, and we’re the mining and cement expert, and we’re both driving new products, solutions, efficiencies, and emission savings to our industries,” he says. “We want to use ready-made technologies like Sustainability Manager to bring highly sustainable products to market faster without having to build our own data solutions from the ground up.”

FLSmidth has chosen Microsoft Azure as its sole cloud platform, and the company is using a wide range of Microsoft solutions across the enterprise that help boost sustainability, productivity, and collaboration. With Microsoft Teams, for example, FLSmidth is reducing the need for travel—and the corresponding emissions—which is important for a company with a presence in nearly 100 countries, often in remote areas.

A journey to 2030 and beyond

The FLSmidth sustainability journey goes beyond just measuring data—it represents a change in the company’s entire business model. “We want to transform from a physical equipment supplier into the leading service provider for our industries as well,” says Tepponen. “As part of our sustainability plans, we’re investing heavily in IoT and AI. IoT not only helps us track emissions, waste, and water, it provides an ongoing data stream we can use to optimize equipment and plant performance and help customers prevent problems before they happen. AI will help us do this in an even more efficient manner.”

Going forward, FLSmidth anticipates integrating additional digital technologies into its efforts, including AI, sophisticated data analysis, and digital twins, using solutions from Microsoft and the broad Microsoft partner network. As this adoption expands, FLSmidth is advancing its sustainability and business goals and making the company a more attractive place to work. “With Microsoft technologies, we’re improving the work lives of our existing employees and boosting recruitment possibilities for the future,” says de Groot.

For FLSmidth customers, the benefits of sustainability go beyond the straightforward bottom-line savings that come with reduced energy and water consumption. Increasingly, those customers’ own clients are demanding information about the sustainability of metals and cement products. “Sustainability for the full value chain is the ultimate goal, and we look forward to working with Microsoft to get there for ourselves and our customers,” says Tepponen. “We’ve already pledged that by 2030 we will have delivered the equipment and services our customers need to reduce their emissions by 56 percent, and we are confident Microsoft can help us achieve that.”

FLSmidth may be 140 years old, but with its MissionZero goals, the company is positioning itself as a modern beacon for other companies in the mining and cement industries to follow. “We believe we are the undisputed leader in sustainability technology for our industries, and we want to continue to build on that,” says de Groot. “We’re a technology company, but we’re also a people company, and we believe that the work we’re doing today with Microsoft will have a real impact that improves the lives of real people for many decades to come.”

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