A sustainable industrial future
Make it happen together

Executive Leadership Panel Discussion &
Roundtables June 7th 2024 – Port Of Antwerp

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A sustainable industrial future - panel discussion and roundtables Make it happen together

Executive leadership panel and roundtable discussion

On June 7th 2024, EFESO Management Consultants hosted an exclusive executive leadership panel and roundtable discussion hosted in Port of Antwerp-Bruges. It provided a platform for leading European industrial and logistic players to share experiences and best practices in achieving sustainability goals while balancing profitability, quality, cost-effectiveness, and regulatory requirements.

The panel discussion featured industry experts such as Veerle Slenders, EVP of Umicore; Frederic Dunon, Deputy CEO of Elia Group; Richard White, Head of Global Procurement of Puratos; and Ralf Duessel, EVP Sustainability of Evonik. They also participated with 30 companies in insightful roundtable discussions focused on four key topics, providing exclusive insights from executive board members of industrial companies on their sustainability transformation journeys, particularly in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction.

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What attendess are saying

Collaboration was a key theme at the event, providing inspiration for us to improve and excel.
Sharing and finding solutions together for common challenges is crucial.
A cross-industry event where we can relate to each other's needs and support one another.
An event offering combined insights to find common solutions.
A space for companies to open up and engage in meaningful discussions.

Hear it from our attendees

Roundtable discussions

Roundtable 1: How to set up a circular Supply Chain for critical metals?

In this roundtable, we leveraged the insights from an international precious metals' recycler to reflect on:
- Challenges we see in transitioning the Supply Chain to a circular model.
- How to establish collaborations with different parties in the Value Chain.
- How a closed-loop business model and the adoption of circular Supply Chains will differentiate a company in the future.
- How synergies can be created upstream or downstream in the Value Chain to accelerate the development of circular Supply Chains.
Roundtable 2: How to build your internal capability to be energy efficient

The Global Head of Engineering from a bakery group, presented the group-wide energy efficiency program. After having announced ambitious energy saving and CO2 reduction targets to the markets in 2023, the group was confronted with the need to support those targets by a roadmap of tangible initiatives in its 26 Production Sites.

They decided to build in-house capability on Energy Efficiency in every plant to ensure a speedy delivery of the Energy Efficiency roadmaps. It also aims at creating local ownership in the sites and a group-wide Energy community. With EFESO, a program was created to train the plant Energy correspondents and providing a plant energy scan toolkit. The program is in rollout and has already created results, ownership and enthusiasm.

The roundtable focused on sharing ideas about implementation challenges with energy efficiency in industrial environments and approaches to overcome them.
Roundtable 3: How to build the capability & create engagement of your Managers & people in an ever-evolving environment

As in many organisations, there was a need to further develop all production employees competences in this ever-changing environment. But how do you tackle this successfully to involve all stakeholders and motivate as many employees as possible, across different target groups, to participate?

Participants in this roundtable gained insights on:
- How to get employees involved in a complex environment and thus increase their commitment?
- How to train & develop employees in the complexity of different target groups in production.
- Getting concrete best practices.
Roundtable 4: How to build the Factory of the Future (2035-2040)

Future factories aim to effectively adapt to external challenges in markets, technology, business models, and global developments. Antifragility is the key characteristic of the Future Factory to be ready for uncertainty, balancing resilience and efficiency in various scenarios.

Sustainable factories include buildings efficiency, environment impact but also the creation of a safe and healthy workplace to attract & retain workforce.

It is a must to support willingness to ‘Reindustrialize’ Europe’.

When building a new factory or fundamentally reshaping an existing factory, challenges include ‘what are the topics to consider’, ‘what is the best approach’, ‘where to start first’, ‘who to involve’ … Knowing that decisions will have impacts for many years, and cost of retrofitting might be huge.