Peter Terwiesch - President of Process Automation, ABB - ARC Forum Executive Interviews

Look, we can really observe that the pandemic has tested the resilience and the agility of both our customers and actually also our own organization. And one of the big challenges that many of our customers and we ourselves also encountered is that people who would normally go to site for commissioning of projects, for providing services, suddenly and unexpectedly they wouldn't be able to go to site anymore. So the senior customer experts, our own specialists for certain technologies, they couldn't go to site because of lockdowns. So this has been a huge accelerator for remote connectivity and digital transformation. And a lot of places where previously there was hesitation towards the pace of technology, now it has really come to the rescue. And I would put that under the headline of: when you can't get what you want, you have to get better at using what you have. So if you can't get to site, let's get better at using technology, let's get better at using data, and provide the expertise remotely.

Yeah, it's an interesting mix of some things that have been with us for a long, long time. We've been in automation, we've been in electrification for literally more than 100 years. But at the same time, we are not just observing, but we're shaping the change, which has been gradual from small isolated pockets of automation towards increasingly more connected, today very much also collaborative across sites with the help of digital technologies and operations. And we're on a journey towards autonomous operations, towards operations that basically augment the senses of humans, relieve humans of doing routine work, and basically enable humans better to take control in places that otherwise would be dirty, dull, or dangerous to be operating in.

Yes, sustainability is really something that's very close to our heart. So the first thing is we start with our own operations and we're driving our own operations in the direction of carbon neutrality. Then, of course, the supply chain is important, so the way we source, the way we govern, the way we work with stakeholders in general. But then indeed, the largest impact we can have on the environment is by helping our customers reduce their emissions. And for that, we've even set a target for ourselves, a quantitative target. We've basically said by 2030 — which is what we do between now and 2030 — we want to help our customers reduce their emissions by 100 megatons per year. So a very quantitative target. And if 100 megatons sounds like an undigestible number, this is roughly the equivalent of 30 million conventional, i.e., combustion engine vehicles. So it's 30 million vehicles equivalent of emissions that we want to help our customers reduce by 2030, and that's annual emissions.

Look, some of the lessons we learned in the lower-for-longer periods — this isn't the first downturn, especially in the energy industries. And we're using, as we always do, technology and introducing new technologies to help our customers lower the cost, schedule, and risk for capital projects. And I'm really excited about what we've developed there: ABB Adaptive Execution, an agile method for industrial project execution that helps our customers harness the advances in digital technologies. We launched that in October, and there's a lot of integration value that the digital technologies provide here. So integrating expert teams also distributed in different locations, new technologies, agile processes, and ultimately all woven into a single stream of accountable project execution. So really excited about it. We have a couple of projects ongoing with it already. Customer feedback is great, and I really think that's one of the contributions we can make with the help of advanced technologies to help projects that would otherwise be challenging economically to make the cut. Because really, you can cut the automation cost by something like up to 40 percent. You can basically reduce commissioning time, you can reduce total schedule — with one example where total schedule went down by six months. And a lot of advantages even all the way through to operations. So I'm really excited about it and getting good customer feedback, and very importantly also good customer orders where together with customers these advantages are translating into actual orders in these challenging times.

Yes, look, digitalization provides significant opportunities there, and a lot of people are talking about it, but it's not always so clear what the opportunity is. From my perspective, the opportunity lies in the operations data, which today is only used to a maximum of 20 percent. And with the right toolbox and the right capabilities using the toolbox, there's a potential to improve operations up to 30 percent productivity in the data. And if that looks complicated, it actually is initially. It reminds me a bit of Rubik's Cube. Remember when we got those Rubik's Cubes anew in the old days? And I was always looking at it and found it pretty hard to solve it initially, until somebody taught me the tricks to make the moves. And it's the equivalent here. You have all this operational data, it resides in different systems, it has different characteristics, not all of it is exactly reliable. But when you actually recognize the pattern, then you know how to contextualize the data, normalize the data. Then suddenly, just like the moves you can learn on a Rubik's Cube, with the right toolbox — and we call ours ABB Ability Genix — it's an industrial analytics and AI suite that is the toolbox for solving the modern version of the Rubik's Cube, i.e., the problem of how to transform operations data into productivity. And we complement that with ABB Ability Genius or Edge Data Manager. And that is a combination that's really driving productivity advantage for operations. So really excited about the impact we're making. Very good feedback from customers, and we've only had it in the market since the third quarter of 2020, but already we can say it's a success.

Thank you, Andy. My pleasure.