In a bid to address this changing risk profile, dam owners are looking to adopt new remote sensing techniques that can give them a more accurate and detailed assessment of their asset base than conventional periodic visual inspections. These new approaches make management of such structures more effective and ultimately safer.

Asset owners and regulators join forces for safety

With many dams in North America already clocking up decades of service, dam owners are adopting new approaches to asset monitoring. SJWD Water District, for instance, is a public water utility located in Spartanburg County in South Carolina which owns five dams. Four of these structures are considered high hazard with significant consequences and high potential for loss of life or infrastructure damage in the event of a failure.

Recognising the increased necessity of trying to stay ahead of any potential failure, the state regulatory agency, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), approached SJWD as a potential partner for a pilot using geospatial AI provider, Rezatec’s dam risk monitoring tool on two of the company’s dams, Lyman Lake and Lake Cooley. These two dams are both earthen dams, one being built in the 1950s and the other in the 1970s. With a lot of dams being constructed during this period these structures are a pretty typical age of dams for South Carolina.

“Our goal is to use this technology to stay ahead of any changes that could impact the integrity of our dams. What really intrigued us about the Rezatec solution was the ability to see the whole dam in more of a granular fashion. It has the ability to detect minor differences and then with the AI make recommendations based off that. It won’t take the place of our inspections, but it enhances and possibly gives us more information by which we can make decisions later on that might affect our capital improvement plans,” says Billy Cothran, CEO of SJWD.

Under the three-year pilot scheme, both SJWD and DHEC receive monthly updates which flag up and provide a location for any potential issues that may arise. While both regulators and owners may have a different set of potential desired outcomes from this pilot there is clear value for a regulatory agency as another set of eyes for them to ensure that things aren’t being missed in the current mandated annual inspection programme.

“This should provide South Carolina DHEC with a greater level of confidence in the efforts taken to monitor assets that could have large potential impacts if not properly managed and maintained,” observes Cothran.

Plotting the outcomes for dam safety

Starting the monitoring programme in December 2020, early results are already encouraging. “In one dam in particular we had an area that stayed fairly wet. We were interested to see if the technology would pick that up and it has. The other dam that we’re monitoring actually had a partial failure of the emergency spillway due to flooding in early February last year. It’s been somewhat of a construction site during the early parts of the pilot and it has picked all that up too,” says Cothran. He adds: “We’re early in the three-year pilot, but so far we’ve been very pleased because it has proven itself on things that we know are already there. What we are looking for now is will it pick up things that we didn’t know about?”

Looking ahead, the programme could be extended to include other high hazard dams. “Assuming a successful pilot we’ll have all of our dams monitored. When you can combine that amount of data over a broad scale with the AI capabilities, that’s a pretty powerful combination for infrastructure owners,” explains Cothran.

Tackling the biggest challenges for dam owners

Like many dam owners, one of SJWD’s biggest challenges is responding to the increasing urbanisation that is seeing more people living in the inundation area of a dam should it fail. There is a significant increase in the consequences of failure and the potential for catastrophic risk. As Cothran says: “Our dams have the highest potential for large impacts to our customers and downstream neighbours if not properly operated and maintained.” It places far greater emphasis on adopting a more proactive approach to dam safety and assessment of the structural integrity of such structures. “It might look somewhat minimal to the naked eye, but measuring to the millimetre brings a new aspect. It is like having a different lens we can use to examine our dams,” Cothran notes. “From our perspective the dams have the largest potential impact on our customers and neighbours so rightfully they need to have a lot of attention. If we can show the public that we are aware of the potential impact of our dams and we’re keeping our public safe, that’s always a plus,” he adds.

As well as making hydraulic structures safer for those communities and businesses that could face inundation in the event of a catastrophic failure, better data-led decision-making can improve the bottom line as well. “It is hard to put a number on cost savings because it really relates to the decision-making such as the timing of capital improvements. We don’t want to spend millions of dollars before we have to but you definitely don’t want to wait too long. The more information we have the better it helps us prepare and plan for when we actually do need to spend that money for any necessary repairs and improvements.”

As Cothran concludes: “The data provided by Rezatec will allow us to cost-effectively monitor our dams”.

This article first appeared in International Water Power magazine.

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In 1998, when most of the UK was preoccupied with the latest Spice Girls single and David Beckham’s disgrace against Argentina in the World Cup, an innocuously named trade organisation was rolling up its sleeves and preparing to transform how the country was powered forever. Known then as the British Wind Energy Association – it has since been rebranded RenewableUK – it spent the year lobbying for the creation of offshore wind farms along the UK’s coastline. Its hard work soon produced fruit: by 2003, the UK’s first offshore blades had started spinning.

Wind power has since become a fundamental part of the country’s energy regime. From just over 3,000MW capacity in 2008, the UK can now boast capacity nearly eight times that, with over 20% of the nation’s electricity now created by turbines on lonely moorlands and in rough seas far from land.

This is an impressive achievement, but preserving all that new power is a different story. Between technical hurdles and tangles of red tape, much of the energy that the UK’s wind turbines spun into existence has historically disappeared – there was just nowhere to keep it.

But with the government finally making energy storage units easier to build and maintain, the country could finally be on the verge of fully exploiting the potential of its winds. A proper storage regime, after all, means the UK could finally build up a reliable depot of renewable energy, whatever the weather – in turn freeing it from the inherent fickleness of the wind and its currents.

Not that some Whitehall bureaucrat can click their fingers and wish a greener UK into existence. Batteries come with their own set of environmental problems, while some critics argue we should simply aim our fire at totally different solutions, especially those with four wheels.

New wind strategies

Between the interminable crises of Covid-19 and Brexit, in December 2020 Boris Johnson found time to announce a brand new energy strategy for his country. Talking with his typical bravado via video to a UN conference on climate change in New York, the UK prime minister proclaimed that his country could be the “Saudi Arabia” of wind energy.

“We’ve got huge, huge gusts of wind going around the north of our country,” he said. “Quite extraordinary potential we have for wind.”

Not a surprising pronouncement, given the prime minister’s rhetorical record. All the same, whatever you think of this typically Johnsonian comparison with the oil-rich absolute monarchy, in this case he actually has a point – at least when it comes to electricity production.

According to Kayte O’Neill, head of markets at National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO), the UK’s energy sector is at a tipping point: “[In 2019,] zero carbon power outstripped fossil fuel in the electricity mix for the first time since the industrial revolution, and [2020 was] a record-breaking year for the UK’s electricity system, with a 68-day coal-free run from spring into summer.”

This enthusiasm is partly shadowed by the numbers. We may not be exporting wind energy like the Saudis sell barrels of oil, but turbines are now so cheap and plentiful that suppliers could soon be paying money back to consumers. Look a little deeper, though, and things are rather less rosy – or were until recently, anyway.

Until July 2020, the government made storage units incredibly difficult to build, which in turn dampened the potential of wind energy. To put it another way, why would operators care about all those gigawatts if they can’t monetise them, buying and selling excess energy as the nation demands?

To be fair, the government’s erstwhile reluctance did start from a sensible place. Trying to prevent inefficient monopolies, it limited interaction between different strands of the market, in some cases banning network operators from owning storage. The problem, of course, is that by definition these units sit somewhere in the middle of the supply chain, halfway between the wind farm and the consumer’s home.

In practice, that limited the enthusiasm or ability of companies to build storage units, a problem compounded by the technology itself. Although the biggest industrial batteries can store over 31MW, they’re ultimately not that different from the ones that charge our mobile phones. And just like the batteries on iPhones and Android phones, they degrade over time – and unlike the common smartphone, cost millions of pounds to replace.

Wind energy storage still poses problems

On the evening of 9 August 2019, just as millions of people were settling down for another Friday night of television, the consequences of these shortsighted policies became darkly apparent – literally. After the Hornsea wind farm, just north of Hull, became disconnected from the grid, the resulting gap in supply resulted in about 3% of UK households losing power. Embarrassing for the powers-that-be, certainly, but also a warning of what happens in a world without battery units.

Had suppliers been able to store energy in advance for just such an emergency, those 750,000 homes would probably not have been affected. That’s doubly true for wind farms, reliant as they are on the fickleness of nature to generate electricity.

Fortunately, such a fiasco seems unlikely to be repeated anytime soon. Although the government only loosened the rules in July, making it easier for electricity companies to invest in storage units, there’s been an explosion of interest. From just 1GW of space, there are already plans for local authorities and energy companies to build over ten times that. More to the point, says O’Neill, this expansion could make a huge dent in the UK’s ambitious energy goals.

“More intelligent energy use and technology will encourage the transition to a smarter, more flexible grid and help us achieve our ambition of being able to operate the grid carbon-free by 2025,” she says. “The rapidly changing grid, with more, smaller and distributed sources of power mean a greater flexibility.”

Professor Phil Taylor agrees. The pro vice-chancellor for research and enterprise at the University of Bristol notes that the future boom in storage units should solve another engineering question: grid inertia. Enormous nuclear or fossil fuel turbines spin for a few seconds, even after they fail, giving enough time for the system to correct itself, but wind farms are too weak to manage the same trick.

As a result, an over-reliance on turbines risks power cuts every time there’s a problem – unless, that is, you can keep enough energy backed up in storage units. As Taylor puts it, energy storage is a “really fantastic way” of balancing wind power and demand, ultimately keeping the whole system stable.

That’s especially true, he adds, if we fully exploit the remarkable power of machine learning and automation. By teaching storage units where and when demand is likely to surge – if a new episode of Love Island is on, for example, or when the nation’s workers make themselves their first tea of the day – the grid can shift energy around automatically.

Broken front

Not everyone is thrilled about the forward march of storage units, however. In an article published in July 2020 for The Conversation, Professor Andrew Cruden, of the University of Southampton, attacked the phenomenon as a waste of money, arguing that policymakers should instead focus on the huge potential of electric vehicles.

Among other things, Cruden pointed out that buses and lorries emit far more carbon emissions than the grid – and that just one in ten of the country’s cars are electric. “Pursuing ever-larger, stationary battery systems,” Cruden wrote, “may not be the optimal solution for the UK to have a renewable energy future.”

A significant challenge, then, but one that Taylor argues is hardly unassailable. Imagine a country, he says, with hundreds of thousands of electric cars, with a certain percentage plugged into the mains at any one time.

Citing the work of E4TheFuture, a US-based clean energy think tank, he imagines a time when excess juice from these vacant car batteries could be returned to the mains at times of stress. That, in turn, would remove the need for expensive stationary storage units altogether – our hatchbacks or SUVs would act as rolling ones instead. O’Neill makes a similar point, suggesting that vehicle-to-grid services could provide up to 38GW of storage space by 2050.

Not that our work is done quite yet. Because they contain toxic chemicals, battery disposal can still damage the environment in whatever form it takes. And then there’s the usual struggle of getting new units fully integrated into an old grid, teaching staff how they work and troubleshooting glitches as they appear.

Even so, you’d have to be brave to bet against the coming dominance of renewables, all the way from Lands’ End to the Scottish Highlands. Not that the British public will really notice, of course. As long as the kettle still boils and the television turns on, they’re far happier watching the Beckhams of today without worrying too much about how it’s all run.

This article first appeared in Issue 1, 2021 of World Wind Technology.

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Historically, mining has been at the heart of all human development, since the transition of cavemen from the Stone Age into the Bronze and Iron Ages. Our progress as a species has been measured in terms of the metals and fuel we dug from the ground powering us through industrial revolutions, wars and technological advancement.

And while much has been made of the destructive ability of the industry, less time is spent reflecting on its enormous potential to build and create. On 24 January 1848, a man named James W Marshall discovered gold in the water wheel of the eponymous lumber mill at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. Despite being sworn to secrecy by the mill’s owner, who feared for his plans to build an agricultural empire if word got out, Marshall had a loose tongue, and the news spread.

The California Gold Rush that sparked off from this moment ran from 1848–1855 and brought roughly 300,000 people to the area to take part in the hunt for the precious metal. The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the US economy and the subsequent rapid population explosion allowed California to swiftly push for statehood, which it duly received in 1850.

The city of San Francisco owes much of its existence to this period of time. It had been a tiny settlement before the rush began, but swiftly boomed as merchants and new people arrived, causing the population to leap from 1,000 full-time residents in 1848 to 25,000 by 1850. It was, in a very real way, built on the back of the mining industry, and is just one example of creative potential of mining. The city would prosper and eventually go on to give the world the United Nations in 1945, the Summer of Love in 1967 and modern-day Silicon Valley.

Graphite, lithium and cobalt are the key to the US’s green energy plans

Silicon, however, is not one of the minerals that holds Rich Nolan’s attention. As the president and CEO of the National Mining Association (NMA), his focus is on graphite, lithium and cobalt – the metals that will help propel the US’s current green energy initiatives – and on helping the industry recover from the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The NMA is the national trade association for the US mining industry, representing coal, metal and industrial mineral producers, mineral processors, equipment manufacturers and other suppliers of goods and services to the domestic mining industry. It is the only national trade organisation that represents the interests of US mining before Congress, the presidential administration, federal agencies, the judiciary and the media.

A year and a half into the pandemic, the NMA’s top concern continues to be the safety of its workforce, “similar to every other essential industry that has continued to work to provide invaluable resources for our country throughout this crisis,” says Nolan. “Our members worked to adjust to the unprecedented challenge presented by the pandemic, following government guidelines with distancing measures, increased cleaning schedules, and limits on gatherings of groups, and our efforts have not stopped there.”

As the self-proclaimed “US mining industry’s voice and biggest advocate”, Nolan has played multiple roles in the NMA over the course of his more than 20 years of experience advocating on natural resources sector issues, previously serving for 13 years as senior vice-president of government as well as political affairs.

Nolan’s current role involves leading the NMA’s public policy efforts before Congress, regulatory agencies and the White House, and setting the strategic agenda for media relations, grassroots communications and political involvement.

It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that his career began on Capitol Hill, where he served as an aide to several members of Congress and worked as an advisor on multiple campaign committees. Currently, he is also a member of the Board of the US Energy Association and serves on the National Coal Council, a Federal Advisory Committee to the US Secretary of Energy.

The importance of investing in mining

In many ways, then, Nolan has served at the forefront of where the US mining industry meets national politics. He has been breathing DC politics for several decades, which gives him a unique insight into how the Biden administration’s future green energy plans are set to affect the sector.

Speculation has steadily grown over the upcoming American Jobs Plan that looks to tackle the US’s crumbling infrastructure, while also taking strides to tackle climate change, with reports estimating the planned spending to come in the region of $2trn.

This plan will reportedly cover everything from building electric vehicle charging stations and power lines that can deliver more renewable energy, to capping oil and gas wells to reduce emissions and reclaiming abandoned coal mines.

Funding will be provided towards the construction of about a million affordable, energy-efficient houses and to improve the energy efficiency of existing structures. Hundreds of billions of dollars will go towards high-growth industries with an eye on the future, such as advanced battery manufacturing.

“The Biden administration has been laser-focused on job creation, infrastructure, green energy and the electrification of our transportation sector – and mining is central to each,” Nolan points out.

The advanced technologies that are essential for the future that the Biden administration has laid out – especially where the green energy goals and support for EV production are concerned – all depend on the domestic mining industry.

The World Bank has estimated that the production of minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt could increase by nearly 500% by 2050 in order to meet the growing demand for advanced energy technologies. For Nolan, then, it’s pivotal that the US invests in the mining operations taking place on its own soil if the country hopes to have its demands met.

“For far too long, our minerals import reliance has been a silent, growing threat to the country. But the Covid-19 pandemic increased [US] awareness of the dangers of a heavily import-dependent and vulnerable supply chain,” he says, pointing out that the US’s import dependence for key mineral commodities has doubled over the past three decades.

“The US is now 100% import-reliant for 17 key minerals, and 50% or more import-reliant for an additional 29 key mineral commodities. All that is despite the fact that we have significant mineral deposits of some of these commodities within our own borders.”

However, Nolan believes that things are starting to move in the right direction. Given the executive orders that have already come out of the administration, its examination of supply chain vulnerabilities and other actions, he’s confident that the Biden administration understands the importance of the key issues facing the US mining industry.

More importantly, he believes they will actively work alongside US industries to better shield them from the extended, complex and fragile supply chains that have been so exposed by the global pandemic.

On coal, for example, the Biden administration has expressed support for the advancement of carbon capture projects, which Nolan sees as essential to addressing the world’s climate challenge.

“On the campaign trail, President Biden called for doubling down on carbon capture and we’ve seen similar enthusiasm from his administration,” he says, with a hint of satisfaction. “And the focus on infrastructure projects – which will require a substantial amount of steel – is significant for metallurgical coal producers.”

Indeed, consultancy CRU Group estimates that $1trn of spending could require an additional six million tonnes of steel, 110,000t of copper and 140,000t of aluminium annually. At the moment, the domestic mining industry is poorly placed to handle that kind of demand, which means that unless action is taken, significant amounts of these metals will have to be imported into the country at great cost.

US mining needs to boost its competitiveness on the world stage

“Our import reliance is alarming, having doubled over the past three decades. Why is that?” Nolan asks. “The key word for this industry is ‘competitiveness’. These are global commodities and we know for many of these metals, US miners are up against competitors that have full-throated government backing, and that don’t operate under the same environmental or labour standards.”

These competitors that Nolan speak of are a varied and diverse bunch, but the biggest by far is China. It may have been the first country hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was also the first to begin recovering from it.

So, while the rest of the world bunkered down in lockdown, China took full advantage of the plunging commodity prices in March and April 2020, importing 6.7 million tonnes of unwrought copper that year – a full 1.4 million tonnes more than its previous record.

These commodity purchases come as part of a broader series of investment by the Chinese state, which has been spending hugely on infrastructure for the past two decades. It is also the largest producer of rare earths, which are integral to just about all of the high-tech applications in development today.

It’s by far the biggest processor of the raw materials used to make lithium ion batteries – lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite – which will serve as the cornerstone in any green energy revolution. While just 23% of the world’s battery raw materials are mined in China, 80% of their intermediate processing takes place there.

In the face of Chinese dominance in this area, Nolan remains bullish, but stresses the need for the US to boost the competitiveness of its domestic mining industry on the global stage.

“We need action to improve mine permitting – the fact that it takes seven to ten years to permit a mine in the US, compared with just two to three in Canada and Australia, is nonsensical,” he says. “And, so, it would be counterproductive to roll back the much-needed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reforms implemented by the previous administration.”

Here, he is speaking about reforms finalised by the Council on Environmental Quality in July 2020, which was intended to update regulations that had first come into effect in 1969, and largely remained unchanged since 1978.

These changes, brought about by the Trump administration, were intended to help federal agencies expedite environmental reviews by placing a stricter limit on their duration.

Similarly, Nolan hopes to see action taken towards ensuring the mining industry has access to the US’s vast resources, rather than locking them away. Most importantly, and here he quotes the US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, saying that she “has warned in reference to our alarming reliance on China for too many critical products and materials, we can’t ‘bow to the altar of low cost’, and put security of supply, [US] workers and responsible development second”.

In order to meet the Biden administration’s green energy goals, then, Nolan and the NMA have worked hard to make it clear that “‘made in America’ must include ‘mined in America’”. That’s particularly relevant within the administration’s push to source some of the advanced energy technologies – such as EVs – from manufacturers in the US.

Building the responsible, advanced energy industrial base the administration’s current agenda envisions is dependent on the materials produced from US mines, by US miners.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there will be no green energy movement without the mining industry,” Nolan says by way of conclusion, before laying out the challenge that lies ahead. “The International Energy Agency is talking about lithium demand growing 40-fold by 2040, followed by graphite, cobalt and nickel where the number is around 20–25 times more.

“We will need to produce the same amount of copper in the next 25 years as humanity has produced in the past 5,000. As the CEO of a lithium producer recently said, demand is about to go ‘vertical’,” he adds, referring to statements made by Piedmont Lithium CEO Keith Phillips back in February 2021.

Looking ahead to MINExpo 2021

Nolan offers some words of encouragement for the industry ahead of the upcoming MINExpo 2021 event at the Las Vegas Convention Center in September, which is organised by the NMA and returns after taking a year off due to the pandemic.

“Our industry is used to operating in extremely difficult conditions, and we have a strong track record of innovating and developing new technologies to tackle seemingly insurmountable challenges,” he says.

“I think we will see more of that creativity dedicated to developing technologies that will continue to reduce the impacts of our projects on the environment, and I look forward to seeing some of those technologies on display on the floor of MINExpo.

“We are coming together in Las Vegas to celebrate what we have overcome to get there, and to kick off what I believe will be a decades-long mining renaissance ahead of us, where we expect to see an unprecedented increase in minerals demand.”

This article first appeared in World Mining Frontiers magazine, Vol. 1 2021.

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Finance Director Europe looks at how automation of accounts receivable can put a company’s data to work – and unlock new opportunities for value creation.

Everyone likes to get paid for their work – and the quicker they get paid, the happier they are. This is true on an individual level, and at enterprise level.

Swift and seamless payment of invoices enables a business to put its revenue to work and build towards the next stage in its growth.

Conversely, delays in payments from customers restrict cash flow, diminish working capital and, ultimately, hold back a business from pursuing its strategic goals.

The order-to-cash (O2C) process is where these pain points arise and is therefore a natural place for organisations to focus – with accounts receivable perhaps the most critical area of all. Until now, however, it has often been overlooked in the search for efficiency.

Enterprises may understand the need to avoid late payments, manage disputes effectively and keep days sales outstanding (DSO) to a minimum. But they often have highly inefficient processes in place.

Much of the AR process is still handled manually, workflows are complex and inefficient, and the collections process is frequently dogged by manual errors, inaccuracies and delays.

In other words, conventionally managing AR is by no means easy. There are numerous components to address, from multiple internal and external data feeds to the complex reporting obligations.

The importance of AR in accelerating cash flow, keeping a firm grip on DSO, improving invoice management and, fundamentally, creating stronger customer relationships nevertheless means that the complexity must be met head-on and conquered.

The question is how a company can quickly affect meaningful change to control DSO, increase the productivity of employees in the AR function, improve cash flow, manage disputes and improve customer engagement. The answer is automation.

Accelerating automation

The market for AR automation has already seen explosive growth in recent years, and the pace of that growth is set to quicken. Adroit Market Research estimates that the market could be worth $4bn by 2025, as companies wake up to the advantages of removing manual and paper-based processes.

As adoption continues to grow in key industry sectors such as manufacturing, finance, retail and consumer goods, the gains could be significant.

A study from Market Insights Reports, which has looked at the potential expansion of the market between 2021 and 2025, concludes that automation across returns processing, workflow management, customer support management, accounting and finance, ERP management and marketing, and consumer behaviour analysis could save as much as $2trn globally – by eliminating the human element from many key tasks.

The rapid growth of the e-commerce sector is also a powerful force driving AR automation. Online sales in the US, for instance, are expected to double by 2023, meaning they will account for as much as 25% of the retail sector.

Some of the growth in online sales – and in the digitalisation of transactions in general – has been driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has pushed businesses and their customers to increasingly virtual interactions.

In such an environment, finance leaders need to look at how digital transformation can be implemented in the AR process, and consider which technologies might help them to achieve results in the most efficient way.

The growth in the automation space has been fuelled partly by the efforts of solution providers to cater for growing demand.

Some of those companies have a very broad approach to enterprise processes, while others – notably HighRadius – are highly focused on the AR space and the application of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and workflow optimisation tools in the O2C process.

Ultimately a CFO needs to find a technology provider that will help unlock the value of internal and external data – and embed data-led intelligence into day-to-day finance practices like AR.

This requires a vendor with intimate knowledge of both processes and pain points, as well as the ability to combine both business and technological expertise to automate manual tasks and integrate all of the requisite data feeds.

Embracing digitalisation

The CFO can undertake a comprehensive review of the O2C process and identify where delays and disruption are caused by manual processes, thereby determining where automation might bring the greatest advantage.

However, the move to automation can only be made when they fully accept that the less human input there is in AR, the more efficiently the process will flow.

The technical aspects of improving productivity in the AR function and centralising key data feeds are simple enough for vendors like HighRadius – thanks to the ongoing development of solutions and a constant hunger for innovation.

Many financial institutions and retail businesses, along with other industry sectors, have proved this point already.

HighRadius has, for example, delivered tangible results to the likes of global nutrition brand Danone, ride-sharing giant Uber, and Swiss insurance company Zurich – whether to reduce days deductions outstanding (DDO) or days sales outstanding (DSO), or to accelerate cash application.

That said, it is not only large multinational enterprises that are benefitting from AR automation. SMEs are also seeing the opportunity to improve efficiency and optimise cash flow. A large proportion of US SMEs are reported to have integrated some workflow automation, or are considering it, and that trend is spreading fast around the world.

Though it counts many multinationals among its clients, HighRadius has also developed its solutions to suit middling enterprises that don’t have the IT resources to consolidate on an ERP platform but still want to automate and streamline their receivables and treasury processes.

The key to this is a suite of cloud-based, AI-driven solutions that help companies to get the best from their people – who it supports with tools designed to assist with better, faster, data-driven decision-making.

Finding the perfect partner

The philosophy of HighRadius is to find the synergies that arise when humans and machines work together, optimising the efficiencies of automation. The company’s autonomous collection solution is a prime example of this drive to data-driven decision support.

The solution manages workflow, optimises call lists and initiatives calls, captures essential features from customer interactions and creates action items, leaving the agent to do what they do best – engage with customers.

Behind that capability is the core of the company’s platform, which draws together multiple data feeds and formats from across the enterprise, integrating them with external data sources to identify and prioritise the customer calls that need to be made, or the disputes that need to be managed.

All of this is delivered using cloud-based, software-as-a-services (SaaS) technology, which gives organisations a central repository of AR information that can be easily and securely accessed from anywhere.

As the cloud, AI and ML increasingly pervade all aspects of forward-looking businesses, CFOs would do well to consider how they can transform the AR process – which is crucial to a company’s strategic planning and future growth.

CFOs will increasingly be required to make sure that customer touchpoints in the finance function are aligned with the broader digital transformation process that so many firms are starting to undertake.

“As the cloud, AI and ML increasingly pervade all aspects of forward-looking businesses, CFOs would do well to consider how they can transform the AR process – which is so crucial to a company’s strategic planning and future growth.”

The benefits for customers, meanwhile, will be the ease with which they can pay invoices – vital in a world where online businesses are taking customer service to the next level. Naturally, engagement with suppliers will improve too. For those suppliers, improved cash flow will be the foundation of their strategic development.

In the latest IDC MarketScape Report, one quote read: “Consider HighRadius when you are looking for an O2C platform capable of handling large, complex processes and IT landscapes,” proving the quality of service and partnership that HighRadius offers.

The right partner will have the tools to both take the strain of traditionally manual processes – and empower the humans in the loop to operate more effectively and actually apply their skills where they are most needed.

Embarking on a journey towards AR automation seems inevitable for many enterprises. But the first step – finding the right solution provider – is the most important of all.

Download the full, exclusive FDE supplement on AR Automation, produced in partnership with HighRadius.

This article originally appeared in FDE summer 2021.

The post The future of AR in a digital age appeared first on NS Energy.

The digital revolution has generated many new benefits for businesses. As organisations become more connected, internally and externally, they are able to tap into wider sources of data for greater depth and nuance, and can store, analyse and aggregate data to power predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Across a range of applications, from real-time supply chain monitoring to sentiment analysis, businesses can now get a view of their customer and operational trends in order to deliver hyper-personalised offerings and slicker user experiences. In short, businesses can now make more data-led decisions with CFOs leading the way.

Any CFOs determined to reach that point will recognise the challenges: siloes between functions need to be broken down and collaboration must improve – with feedback delivered quicker and more accurately to underpin strategic decisions with real rigour.

Achieve that, and the benefits – from better customer experiences to more efficient cash management and sustainable growth – will come into view.

Creating synergy 

“The big shift during the pandemic has been a greater focus on improving forecasts and prescriptive insights – everything in finance’s transformation journey is working towards that,” says Vivek Saxena, F&A service line leader at Genpact, who points to the removal of barriers between functions as a vital element in driving improvements in forecasting and other modelling functions.

“Rather than input coming from business functions and finance trying to interpret it, now finance can get a genuine conversation going where insight is shared between functions,” he says. So, what do these new data-led insights deliver across the business more broadly?

“When they become an integral part of operations, finance will be able to provide the business with better insight on demand,” says Saxena. “We see many other functions complain about having to wait until the end of the month for that, but if you can shorten the length of that cycle then business partnering will inevitably improve.”

“Leading finance functions are focused on making data intelligent,” he says, pointing to better collaboration, faster, better decisions, value creation, innovation and growth within the business, as well as an improvement in the quality of forecasts and risk modelling.

“And it should also – with the right approach – begin to improve integration and communication with suppliers, vendors and partners,” says Saxena.

“Running data analytics applications empowers finance teams. These teams will change shape and focus – they will understand their business segments better and they will combine knowledge of past events with a keen eye on future trends.” Saxena’s view is simple: CFOs must understand the past and present to predict the future.

This is where machine-based forecasting is coming to the fore. But he emphasises that technology alone can only process data faster, it can’t interpret it. This is why organisations still need their finance experts with an understanding of the business and industry to clarify how the forecasts will impact the business.

Intelligent decisions 

Genpact CFO Ed Fitzpatrick believes that to harness the transformative power of analytics, first organisations must consolidate, organise and make sense of data and then provide dashboards with insights that people can use to make more informed decisions. And new technology, particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning, are helping CFOs make sense of data in real time.

“One of the biggest benefits is that the volume of data is spreading across the organisation – now as CFO I’m looking at data across the business, not just internal but external data,” he says. “That might be industry-specific data, customer data, competitor data and so on. And, increasingly, we will use AI to organise the data and highlight potential challenges and opportunities.

“Think of accounts receivables,” he continues. “If we can highlight your top five customers that are likely to default based on the data you have access to, such as past performance and invoice discrepancies – pulling all that data together helps highlight where the receivable collection focus should be. Being able to get through such high volumes with speed is a game changer.”

And that’s not the only example of data married to intelligent analysis. “Touchless accounts payable is certainly possible, but it takes two to tango,” Fitzpatrick points out. Vendors also need to be up to speed in terms of automation. “It’s that combination of process and industry expertise coupled with the right technology that is essential.”

Because, as Andy Halford, CFO of Standard Chartered, explains, data for its own sake is close to useless. How it is used to improve the business represents the real step forward. “Ultimately, I think that finance functions will increasingly be judged by the quality of the advice that they’re giving to the management team and in a way the traditional processing of data will be done by default,” he says.

“So CFOs need to use data to deliver a 360º view of the business: about how you make information more forward-looking and less backward-looking, and how to determine if it could add value to what the business does, rather than simply presenting interesting facts.”

Working smart

Widening out the net to include internal and external data is a powerful way to secure competitive advantage. Companies across sectors must consider every piece of insight to help them to understand why customers behave the way they do, and how to deliver products and services to meet those needs. And increasingly that goes beyond simple quantitative data into unstructured, qualitative data gathered through, for example, social media and other sources.

This data provides the opportunity to see gaps in services, consumer needs and experiences and plug those with partnerships that benefit both parties. As a CFO working in financial services, Halford is well aware that the competition from the new digital challengers presents a great opportunity to drive growth, develop new income streams and provide the services and experience customers want and businesses can learn from.

Halford’s experience using technology to drive better strategy is especially compelling. Standard Charted has, in recent years, used a data-led approach to secure partnerships with competing players in the sector – many of which lack the necessary capability to meet rigorous regulatory requirements.

“Some of those businesses that have direct customer contact don’t want to actually get into the details of all that complex banking delivery,” Halford says, explaining that Standard Chartered have worked with retailers to integrate a wider set of financial services into their offering.

“If we can help them make the purchasing process simpler, through the use of a simple bolt-on which offers customers the chance to access credit facilities for other products, we can actually make that process seamless, and leave it with the other party to actually deliver.” That type of intelligent partnering, Halford believes, represents a benefit for all parties.

But of course, it relies on technology that can flex and scale as the business opens up new markets. In other words, innovation must sit at the heart of that process, as evidenced by one of Standard Chartered’s flagship projects currently running in Indonesia, where the bank has partnered with an online retailer to seamlessly offer credit products via the retailer’s website – offering the customer the chance to buy more with fewer clicks.

The aim is to combine Standard Chartered’s credit checking abilities with the retailer’s well-developed customer service offering, and the collaborative project then allows for increased credit availability among various consumer groups.

Halford adds, “The front end is seamless – why would a bank choose to not go down that route? It will still do the same credit vetting but with the right partner, it may source more interesting retail customers and therefore there could be a win-win in that situation.”

Predict and pre-empt

Halford is one of many CFOs who now prioritises the use of analytics to develop an understanding of public perceptions, a vital factor for a business in a ruthlessly competitive sector. “We monitor, as I’m sure many businesses do, feedback from customers which we take from samples on a regular basis,” he says. “We look at their propensity to recommend our brand, for instance, while we also track the positive or negative bias of the media articles.”

The bank also conducts extensive polling on the recognition of its brand in different places and communities, and through its Liverpool FC sponsorship, it does a lot of work to understand whether that is extending the company’s reach. “So we’ve got a number of tentacles out that are constantly feeding information back,” Halford says of the efforts to understand customer desires and adapt its offerings accordingly.

Ilkka Hara, CFO of Kone, a manufacturer and service provider of elevators, escalators and flow solutions, says that technology now makes it much easier for CFOs to track, not only customer sentiment but also to deliver a hyper-personalised customer experience. “We’ve been in a very good position to start using technology to provide something which is extremely valuable to our customers,” he explains.

Under Hara’s guidance, Kone has invested in technology that allows the business to tailor maintenance packages to meet individual customer needs. “So every individual contract that we sign today is unique, but then with that, we also get feedback every day,” notes Hara. “With a broader set of data coming in from the field we can better understand exactly the maintenance service that customers want to buy.”

Hara believes Kone is better equipped to gain foresight about what exactly the customer actually needs from the products or services, and where Kone can provide value and solve the issues around that directly.

Hara’s work at Kone is an example of how the use of AI-led analytics can really make a difference in how the business operates, as well as what it can offer for its various business partners.

With over 1.4 million elevators in its maintenance base across its many customers, the CFO says he needs to analyse high volumes of data to better understand how to offer service solutions to a fragmented and varied customer base.

“So, for example, robotic process automation is one which can be a solution to easily automate the data collection and analysis process around a diverse set of customers and their requirements.

“With our KONE 24/7 connected services solution, we are actually getting real-time feedback on the usage of those elevators. And the more data you get, the quicker you learn. I think that’s quite an exciting position to be in at this point,” he says.

This new method of accessing data analytics allows companies to respond and adapt immediately, allowing for greater – and faster – innovation than was previously possible. It is the CFOs willing to embrace this reality who find themselves most equipped to benefit.

Ultimately, Hara and his fellow CFOs are now in a far better position to deliver sharper insights and more accurate forecasting, and create a more agile, intelligent enterprise.

Read Genpact’s ‘CFOs Empowering Enterprise in the Age of Instinct’ report in full.

This article originally appeared in FDE summer 2021.

The post The big picture: How CFOs can develop smart strategies through analytics and insight appeared first on NS Energy.

CFOs are increasingly vital to these changes, using data to increase transparency, deliver insight on performance, and enable their companies to take a more ethical approach. With the help of senior finance leaders from across business, Finance Director Europe explores how the CFO can take the lead.

Traditionally, many CFOs might have answered questions about corporate purpose with a simple response: to control costs, increase revenue, manage risks and deliver value to shareholders, owners and investors.

However, it’s fair to say that the past decade has seen the emergence of a number of trends that now demand input from the finance function.

These questions include: what is long-term value? Who are we ultimately accountable to? What does the company exist for? And how are we developing our people so that they become well-rounded and fulfilled professionals able to make a genuine contribution to the company and beyond?

A defining question

It’s a question that Andy Halford, CFO of Standard Chartered, feels must involve the CFO.

“There’s no doubt we’ve moved on from the days when a corporation could just look at itself as a self-contained entity with just a few shareholders and say: ‘Let’s make some money and that is it.’”

Nowadays, however, society, customers and employees demand a great deal more from businesses. They are expecting a contribution to local communities through worthwhile employment and sustainable environmental practices such as paying the right level of tax and rooting out bribery and corruption.

In short, it’s clear that businesses that don’t adapt will soon suffer.

Halford believes the CFO is crucial in defining not only how the business plays its role in wider society – but also in how it views itself alongside the growing and improving competition.

“The whole issue of purpose is wrapped up in the question of what will help my business stand out from the crowd? What do we want to do that will resonate with our employees and will make them proud to work for us? How can we help our communities? The word ‘purpose’ is real – it’s not just something you put on the shelf and pick back up occasionally.”

These questions are at the heart of what Standard Chartered does in its environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.

And it is leading to clear action: the bank recently launched its first sustainability bond, aiming to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges in underfunded regions, and bringing cheap and reliable financing to where it matters most, it seems clear that the bank is serious about its obligations.

Indeed, the majority of the €500m bond proceeds will finance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in emerging markets, including providing good jobs and growth, helping develop industry and infrastructure, and supporting affordable and clean energy.

“The whole question of purpose is wrapped up in that: what is it that’s going to make my business stand out from the crowd? What is it that we want to do that will resonate with our employees and will make them proud of working for us?”– Andy Halford, CFO, Standard Chartered

A broader perspective

Integrating a company’s purpose into how it plans to grow, where it wants to operate, and how it sees its place in the larger ecosystem are questions that few organisations might naturally direct towards finance.

But the explosion of new sources of data – and the ability to analyse how they affect both the bottom line and broader questions of sustainability – means that this is beginning to change.

“We are seeing companies making strides in areas like emissions and supply chain and clean energy,” says Vivek Saxena, F&A service line leader at Genpact.

“And it requires a clear framework in terms of disclosure and reporting. Because ESG is still quite a nebulous area with lots of different definitions, that framework still needs work and refinement.”

“Finance has a background in analysis,” continues Saxena, “so that means ownership of ESG analysis can be given to finance teams: they have reporting skills and experience working with regulators, so it’s a natural fit.”

CFO of Kone, a manufacturer and service provider of elevators, escalators and flow solutions, Ilkka Hara agrees that the CFO must lead on the question of purpose and that the uniqueness of the role makes that contribution even more vital.

“I think from a CFO perspective, you can bring into the game quite an interesting perspective: how do you make the mission live? How is our vision creating the best people for experience for people? And then also what is our actual performance on delivering that to our customers?  So, it creates a loop.

“But I think where CFOs can actually make a big contribution in this area is not only internally, but beyond that. We need to be working with the customer, but also more importantly we should be interacting with all of the investors and other stakeholders to find out what they expect of us.”

Painting the picture

Driving that external communication effectively requires an in-depth understanding of what makes the company tick, what risks it faces, and how it plans to mitigate them.

“I talk to investors all the time, and they want to know what we’re doing to drive ESG initiatives,” says Ed Fitzpatrick, CFO of Genpact.

“They want to know if we’re plugged into our communities around the globe and whether we’re making an impact on the environment – how are we governed?”

So the more that gets automated and put through into dashboards and measured, the more you can improve. And I think we’ve done a decent job at that, we’re thinking about diversity, inclusion and so on. And as the demands to see action from outside voices grow, we are already in a strong position to provide that insight.”

Fitzpatrick explains that every senior leader at the company has a role to play in delivering on Genpact’s purpose: “For example, while I’m the CFO, the infrastructure team also ultimately reports into me, which includes our transport facilities around the world. We are extremely focused on understanding and reducing our carbon footprint, for instance.”

All this is important: “We don’t just act on ESG because it’s the right thing to do, it also adds value.” Hara agrees that for many CFOs, the dialogue with investors, staff and other stakeholders has changed enormously in recent years.

“A few years ago, you tended to have discussions around ESG with experts from time to time,” he says. “Now you rarely have a meeting where you wouldn’t talk about ESG.”

“While we’ve been focused on making progress for many years already now, we have now taken a much more transformational approach on ESG topics. We want to see that as something where we can be a leader – not only in our industry but more broadly.”

Demanding more

The journey that many in finance will go on – from training and qualifying to mastering the basics of running the numbers in a responsive business – is becoming more intense and demanding as technology drives change.

Indeed, Fitzpatrick argues that the changes wrought by digital transformation represent both an opportunity and a challenge for the CFO to embed a sense of purpose across the organisation. And that requires moving beyond mission statements and offering career development options that get the best out of staff.

“As finance leaders in the past we have hired people with finance and accounting degrees and some level of expertise in management information systems,” explains Fitzpatrick, “but they’ve only used a fraction of those skillsets day-to-day because a lot of what they do involves pulling data from multiple disparate systems and consolidating it into a spreadsheet just in time for a meeting the next day.”

Now, with companies making more use of data-led analytics, employees are fully able to use the skills they gained at university and business experience they’ve acquired while working – that they’ve always wanted to apply – which can go a long way to improving recruitment and retention of talented staff.

The more fulfilled they are, the more likely they are to stay on with the business. With finance now expected to use data to deliver more strategic advice, it’s not surprising that more CFOs are focusing on harnessing technology to liberate staff from the ‘handle-turning’ duties.

A look in the mirror

Increasingly, CFOs must ask whether they are up to the task of empowering others to deliver on the business’s stated purpose? And do they know where their own strengths and weaknesses lie?

“I think increasingly we now have to step back and critically assess where improvements are necessary and where to focus our attention,” Fitzpatrick says.

By assessing company core competencies and identifying areas of weakness, CFOs can enhance their understanding of how technology can help the business and free up precious management time to address more strategic, purpose-led issues.

“I think the element of trust has risen in importance,” says Standard Chartered’s Halford. “It’s all very well having good systems but at the end of the day, most systems report on what’s just happened, whereas in fact what you need to be focusing on is what’s about to happen and that tends to be about how the team is doing.”

Many of the issues facing finance teams now tend to be about communication particularly since Covid hit – Halford says he focused the time previously spent elsewhere taking more calls with his people to allow for as much discourse and collaboration as possible.

“Many of those were quick check-ins; they didn’t have to be long calls, just ‘How are things going?’ Helping them to feel able, if they were troubled by something, to pick up the phone or get on the VC and talk about it. Our purpose was to explain that a problem shared was better solved by early interaction and teamwork.”

A new normal

Looking ahead, there’s no doubt that challenges will grow. But smart businesses can harness technology to better understand their place in the world and communicate to their stakeholders what they’re doing to make it a better place.

In doing so, businesses are able to not only ask the bigger, tougher questions, but they can also begin to find the answers.

Fitzpatrick firmly believes that in order to take a leading role in shaping the company’s purpose, the CFO has to get out of the traditional silo and grab the opportunity to demonstrate how finance – through the smart use of technology and careful business-wide implementation – can serve as an engine for change.

“It’s a lot to do with the allocation of my time and the ability to do certain things,” Fitzpatrick comments. “Thanks to automation and smarter tools, more tedious tasks are being left behind. And as things get easier, I’m able to get more focused on the bigger strategic questions that face the business, and to support the business in delivering on its purpose, which is exactly what the CFO of today should be doing.”

Read Genpact’s ‘CFOs Empowering Enterprise in the Age of Instinct’ report in full.

This article originally appeared in FDE summer 2021.

The post A question of purpose: How finance can drive an organisation’s principles and practices appeared first on NS Energy.

The value of data to any business is now perhaps greater than any single commodity. The ability to aggregate huge amounts of information and turn it into digestible and actionable insight is the biggest breakthrough in business since the birth of the computer.

And while accountants and those entrusted with steering an organisation’s finances have always relied on the collection and management of basic information, the volume and sophistication of data available has increased exponentially – to become a genuine driver of competitive advantage across all business sectors.

It allows the CFO to not only understand how underlying factors are driving business performance, but also, through the use of AI, machine learning, and cloud computing, to make more informed and predictive decisions based on rigorous, clear metrics.

The role of the data guardian

By taking on the role of data guardian, the CFO is now more empowered to effect change. And an essential part of that role involves centralising and standardising high-quality, well-governed data and understanding how it can support the agile and responsive business in its growth journey.

In doing so, finance can become a key enabler in making sure the business has the right data and insight to drive better decisions.

In partnership with CDOs, CFOs face challenges to achieve this: the volume of data is ever-growing, there are disparate sources and types of data, while the availability, quality, standardisation of data demands a keen focus on where the business should direct its efforts.

Instead of relying on other business functions to report on disparate sources of data, “we now have a situation where CFOs have a direct view of enterprise-wide-data and they can really get that data-to-insight-to-action loop working, explains Vivek Saxena, F&A service line leader at Genpact.

“Insights are used to make better decisions and for the business to take action. But not only that, finance teams are now able to see if the data moved because of those actions – whether the insights led to the right actions and what are the learnings,” he says.

“CFOs are much more informed about the end-to-end journey, which was not possible before. And the time it takes for finance to understand the consequences of its actions is now quicker and more efficient.”

Many businesses are now entering a phase whereby data capture is running by default across business units. That means they can increasingly draw on a greater breadth of data sources.

While work to improve internal streams of performance data has been ongoing for some time, many CFOs are looking outward to capture a broader range of metrics, from customer experience and sentiment to ESG-related measures that give a truer picture of the company’s impact in its communities and on the environment.

Taming the data tiger

These new data types offer an exciting glimpse into the future of insight-driven business strategy. Businesses can now capture and analyse both structured and unstructured data, as well as more experiential and qualitative customer insights. This data may come from both within and outside the business.

Through digitech and the clever use of automation and AI tools such as RPA and natural language processing, capturing data of all types is now easier. The next step is to make sure that what is captured is accessible, digestible, and delivers value, and does so with minimal cost and time delay. And that requires building the right kind of systems and processes to create a flexible data infrastructure to deliver real value.

“We’ve done a lot to try to simplify the data that we have available to analyse within the business. Like many businesses over the years, we have probably grown to have data dotted around the place and actually getting that in more consistent shape has been a big challenge,” says Standard Chartered CFO Andy Halford, who works alongside 85,000 employees across a banking giant with a presence in 59 territories, serving customers in close to 150 markets.

Halford’s story – where finance takes the lead on centralising data – is increasingly typical. Acting as de facto director of data, the CFO is now able to bring the traditional finance disciplines to bear. That means prioritising standardisation and efficiency of process in order to improve the quality of the data pool and harvest more compelling data sets.

Installing systems that deliver clarity, however, isn’t always so simple. “I think sometimes some businesses can end up with so much data – and so much analysis – that it actually becomes quite confusing as to what you take away from it,” Halford reflects.

And he believes the CFO is in the perfect position to articulate to the business how data can underpin better strategic decision making by looking and asking, “what is going to be the thing that’s going to change; are we riding the crest of that wave; are we off the pace with that; what more do we need to do to position ourselves in the right way to take advantage of this?”

Releasing the power of data

Halford is clear about the next steps: “Now we can take unsorted data and derive insight from it,” he says. “I think knowledge has been important over many decades in taking businesses forward, and we are fortunate that, with technology, the ability to actually crunch very, very large amounts of data very, very fast is huge.”

And beyond that lies a further frontier, as finance uses its facility with data to empower other business units to make better decisions backed up by insight.

“As CFOs we have to understand that the ambition, as well as the demand from the business, is increasing every day,” says Ilkka Hara, CFO of Kone, a manufacturer and service provider of elevators, escalators and flow solutions.

In his view, the basic ‘ticket to play’ in the data sphere means steering the finance function to a position where it can deliver compliance, risk management and the capability to record what happened in the past. But that’s just the beginning.

“Then it’s a question of what you can do in terms of really helping the organisation to look forward and understand not only what happened, but also what you should do about it,” he says.

“You need to be in a position where you help the whole organisation by giving them visibility as well as an understanding of the data that is coming from finance.” For a seasoned CFO like Hara, it’s no longer enough to understand where the deviations or exceptions came from.

“Now, it’s really about saying what are the decisions we should take today – and tomorrow – based on the data we have available,” he explains. “I need to be able to understand how we should lead the business going forward. And I think that’s clearly more of an ask to finance than it ever has been before.”

“How we analyse and apply data is not only improving efficiency in projects and processes, but also enables finance to be a better business partner.

“That means we need to enable the people who are doing the work every day, maintaining the elevators and escalators, to make the right decisions; and they make thousands of decisions every day,” Hara explains. “It’s really important that we are enabling the transparency and availability of the right data to the right people.”

Automated service

Genpact CFO Ed Fitzpatrick believes that automation is the secret sauce to not only gathering data and turning it into actionable insights, but also liberating finance to deliver real value. “We want to drive automation to get more into the analytics so that business leaders can make better decisions,” he says.

Fitzpatrick’s discussions with Genpact clients across the world reveal that driving cost savings is now table stakes. “The real differentiation is to free up finance teams’ time to focus on crafting and delivering insight to help the business in a range of areas, from targeting new customers to pricing a deal more effectively.”

It’s a transformative idea, and one that resonates with Ilkka Hara – who has been working on his company’s finance journey in two key ways. “Firstly, it’s been about driving efficiency in our operations: that’s about harmonisation and also centralising work wherever possible, in terms of actual countries as well as the various service centres we operate in within those countries.

“Secondly, we see good opportunities for automating processes and also, then, improving the master data framework that we have in place.” Hara suggests trying smaller iterations of new policies first to see how they turn out.

“Clearly, from our perspective, we’ve identified where we can see the best opportunities, and for us it’s been about starting with ‘business first’: where do we see value for customers being created and how can we do it better? Ultimately, we see that in our overall processes, there lies a lot of opportunities in the long-run for automation as well as significant further efficiency improvements.”

Ultimately, there is no doubt that internal and external changes have to be made before any company can fully and confidently rely on a data-led approach. These changes can be structural, interpersonal and managerial – all must align for a data-led approach to be successful.

Every CFO will recognise that the journey towards a data-driven enterprise will not always be a smooth one, but the opportunity to harness the potency of data to power better decisions across the business is one too enticing to ignore.

Read Genpact’s ‘CFOs Empowering Enterprise in the Age of Instinct’ report in full.

This article originally appeared in FDE summer 2021.

The post The power of data: How CFOs can harness data to power better decision-making appeared first on NS Energy.

Next year, if everything goes to plan, Oxford PV will become the first company to sell perovskite-silicon-based solar cells to the residential rooftop market. They will have a potentially game-changing efficiency, about 20% higher than the current incumbent technology, silicon-only cells.

Oxford PV employs a “tandem” concept in which a thin film of perovskite is applied to a conventional silicon primary (or bottom) cell (the perovskite thickness being about 1/200th of that of the silicon).

This tandem approach improves the ability to capture specific parts of the solar spectrum, particularly at the high-energy, blue end, meaning that the perovskite-on-silicon tandem cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 43% vs 29% for silicon-only cells.

In practice, the average efficiency of residential silicon PV installed to date is in the range of 15-20%, while the “real world” maximum for silicon is estimated to be about 26%.

The early commercially produced Oxford PV tandem cells are expected to achieve an efficiency of about 27% initially, but the company anticipates steady improvements as the technology develops in the coming years. “We have a clear roadmap to take this technology beyond 30%,” says CEO Frank Averdung.

Dr Chris Case, CTO at Oxford PV, notes that since 2014, when the company decided to focus exclusively on the perovskite-Si tandem, it has boosted the efficiency of its solar cell roughly by one percentage point per year on average and has a path and the theoretical foundations to further develop this technology all the way to the high 30s.

A research cell employing the Oxford PV technology has already achieved 29.52% (as certified by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory), a world record for perovskite-Si tandem cells and also better than any single-junction research cell (for which the current record, 29.2%, is held by a cell employing GaAs).

Perovskite was first discovered in its naturally occurring mineral form (CaTiO3) in 1839 (coincidentally the same year as the photovoltaic effect was first observed, Chris Case points out). But it is only in the last ten years or so that the huge potential of synthetic perovskites as a material for solar cells has been fully recognised.

Prof Henry Snaith, who co-founded Oxford PV in 2010 to commercialise solar technology transferred from his laboratory at the University of Oxford (and is the company’s chief scientific officer), has played a key role in this, notably via a paper published in Science in 2012, describing a viable solid-state solar cell technology employing metal halide perovskite.

Progress over the past 10 years has been remarkably rapid and perovskites are attracting increasing interest in the solar field.

Like all materials used in solar cell applications, perovskites – for which the generic chemical formula is ABX3, where A and B are cations and X is the anion – are semi-conductors.

“Perovskites will be ubiquitous in photonics and electronics for the next 50-100 years,” Chris Case believes. “It’s that stunning a material.”

From a materials science standpoint, “there is a uniqueness, that’s why it’s so good,” he adds. “Each of the atoms is oriented as a set of octahedra that are stacked on top of each other, and twisted. That twist allows ‘anomalous’ high photocurrent diffusion, and that’s pretty much unique to this structure, and people are exploiting this property…This stuff is great, it’s unbelievably transformative.”

Also, the materials used for synthetic perovskites are abundant, and the amount used per unit of cell output is very small. “So, from a resources standpoint, the technology is capable of being scaled to the many TW level,” says Case.

And as well as demonstrating record efficiency, cells and modules using the Oxford PV technology have also “passed externally measured industry-standard reliability tests from the International Electrotechnical Commission,” he adds.

The route to market

“The scientists have done their job,” says Frank Averdung. “They have identified the material. They have made the structure. They have worked at making it stable and have addressed concerns about durability and lifetime. The question we have to figure out an answer to now is: how do we commercialise it?”

The challenge is one that is faced by pretty much every start-up with something new, he says. “You have an established market. You have established market players. You have something significantly better. But how do you get people to embrace it? How do you make it happen?”

As he points out, the established players are multibillion-dollar companies and they have invested billions into a manufacturing infrastructure. “Are they really interested in scrapping all of that and doing something new?” asks Averdung.

The good news is that the Oxford PV tandem technology, with silicon as the primary cell, does not require the jettisoning of existing manufacturing technology and “does not disrupt the industry”, and this is a major benefit.

“When we put a thin film perovskite cell on top of the silicon ‘primary’ cell, it still has the same form factor and still looks like a conventional Si cell, but the output voltage is higher,” says Averdung. “You can use the same tools and insert them into the same modules. The panel size is the same. Everything is the same. But you get significantly more power out.”

In terms of appearance the end-user will not notice any major difference, except it will “look a little bit nicer”, he adds.

In 2015, Oxford PV demonstrated that the tandem cell was feasible, but needed to “bring it to the required form factor”, he explains, so required a pilot production line or “used factory”.

Just such a factory was found in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, and acquired in 2016. “It was way too large for us that time but was a perfect fit for our thin-film pilot line”, which was up and running in 2017,” says Averdung.

“The role of the pilot line was, and still is, essentially product optimisation, taking all the results from the Oxford lab and scaling them up form-factor-wise and carrying out industry-standard testing to verify that the cells are achieving the required reliability and long term stability, and meeting industry needs.”

For some years, Oxford PV worked with a joint development partner, a very large company in the photovoltaics business, “basically telling us what the industry would want”, says Averdung.

But in 2018, he adds that “all that changed”, and the company decided the “best and fastest route to commercialisation of the technology would be to do it ourselves, enabling us to keep all the parameters of the technology under our control so we could be certain that the product, when it came to the market was a perfect fit to customer demands”.

This required the firm to find investors that would put money into it, enabling it to set up a manufacturing operation. “We were lucky”, says Averdung, as a number of supportive investors were found. The company’s major shareholders now include Equinor, Legal & General Capital, Goldwind and Meyer-Burger.

The money put into the company by investors made it possible to upgrade the Brandenburg factory previously acquired and, in addition to the pilot line already there, establish a full tandem cell manufacturing line in a different part of the facility.

This will be the world’s first volume manufacturing line for perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells and is expected to achieve an initial target capacity of 100 megawatts (MW) around Q2 next year.

The cells are being sold to module makers (arrangements are already in place), and the initial target market is the “premium” residential rooftop sector. In this segment of the market, space is a critical constraint and the increased power density provided by the Oxford PV tandem cell is particularly attractive.

With much more electricity generated over the installation’s lifetime, there is a willingness to pay substantial premiums for high-efficiency modules, Oxford PV believes.

Averdung points out the costs of the cells account for a relatively small proportion of the total costs of a residential rooftop PV installation, so increased cell costs have only a relatively small effect on the overall economics compared with the benefits of increased output.

Towards the gigafactory

The 100-MW manufacturing line, and the residential rooftop market, are seen as just the beginning. Oxford PV’s vision is an all-electric world with perovskites as a mainstream solar technology. It is hoped the company’s latest funding round will give it “the means to plan the next step, which is a gigafactory”, says Averdung.

He hopes to have 2 gigawatts (GW) of production capacity in operation by the end of 2024 or thereabouts, and then to add about 2GW per year, reaching more than 10GW by the end of the decade.

Initially, the target market is, as already noted, the premium residential rooftop, but “this will change once we get into GW scale production, then we will be able to address, in addition, the small-commercial rooftop sector”, says Averdung, and “as soon as we move to 5GW and beyond, utility-scale is within reach”.

At utility-scale, “it is all about LCOE”, he observes, “assuming the cost of your land is manageable”, and at 5-GW production capacity “our LCOE will be more competitive than anyone else’s, but that will take a few years, of course”.

In the end “we intend to become one of the major players in photovoltaics”, says Averdung. And mastering what Chris Case calls the “magic” of perovskites could prove to be the key to achieving that ambition.

This article originally appeared in Modern Power Systems magazine

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The International Hydropower Association (IHA) says the launch of Climate Bonds Standard criteria for hydropower paves the way for a “new era” for green investment in renewable energy and will help accelerate global decarbonisation efforts.

The hydropower sector-specific criteria were released on 25 March 2021 by the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI), a not-for-profit organisation responsible for climate bond standards and certification.

CBI certified climate bonds are widely regarded as the best way to direct investment to infrastructure that supports the Paris Agreement while reducing negative impacts on local environments and communities.

CBI criteria already exist for solar, wind, marine and geothermal power among other industries.

“The world needs urgent investment in renewables to avert catastrophic climate change,” says Eddie Rich, Chief Executive of the International Hydropower Association.

“Until now, the lack of specific hydropower climate bond criteria has meant that most issuers have either excluded hydropower or limited investments to small-scale projects.”

Certification

The Climate Bonds Standard Board (CBSB) approved the Hydropower Criteria under the International Climate Bonds Standard which means that certification for hydropower is now formally available for issuers of green debt products across all markets.

The criteria were developed through a technical working group process that included representation from the WorldWide Fund for Nature, International Institute for Environment and Development, International Union for Conservation of Nature, IHA and others.

It was then reviewed by an industry working group and underwent a public consultation process in 2019-2020.

The Hydropower Criteria encompasses the broad components of climate mitigation, and climate adaptation and resilience.

To qualify for a climate bond under the new Hydropower Criteria, a hydropower project must:

• Demonstrate it has a high power density or a low emissions intensity: recording either a power density of more than 5W/m² or an emissions intensity of less than 100gCO2e/kWh if the facility was operational pre-2020; and either a power density of more than 10W/m² or an emission intensity of less than 50gCO2e/kWh if the facility became operational in 2020 or thereafter.
• Undertake an official assessment using the ESG Gap Analysis Tool (HESG), one of the IHA Hydropower Sustainability Tools. The assessment must be carried out by an accredited assessor, be publicly available, and demonstrate: No more than ten gaps in total against international good practice; No more than two gaps in each section.

The majority (>50%) of the gaps must be closed within 12 months and the remaining within 24 months. Projects of all sizes, types (including pumped storage), and in all locations, will be eligible, provided they meet the Hydropower Criteria.

A number of green bonds have already been issued to finance or refinance hydropower projects. CBI says that “considering the potential negative impacts of the specific assets and projects linked to those green bonds, it is necessary to ensure consistent and credible guidance is available to investors who wish to channel funds into green bonds linked to hydropower”.

Furthermore, the criteria ensure that a robust and transparent screening process will certify that investments are ‘climate compatible’, enabling greater climate adaptation and resilience, and do not cause significant harm in respect of wider environmental or social issues.

“The urgency of the climate crisis calls for the accelerated adoption of renewable and sustainable energy sources. Sustainable hydropower is part of the suite of clean energy options to replace coal, oil and gas generation and help meet future demand for low carbon energy,” Sean Kidney, CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative says.

“Certification under the Climate Bond Standard will now provide a best practice guide for investors as to the environmental features of potential hydro investments.”

“The CBI’s new Climate Bonds Standard criteria clears the way for significant additional investment in sustainable hydropower,” Eddie Rich, IHA Chief Executive adds.

“It provides the clarity and assurance that investors, governments, the industry, as well as local communities, have demanded for years. To qualify, new and existing projects must now assess their environmental, social and governance performance and report a low carbon footprint.

“Let there be no mistake,” Rich continues, “these are tough criteria to meet for any energy industry. Whilst the hydropower sector can be proud of being held to the most rigorous sustainability investment criteria for any renewable, we will continue to strive for a level playing field to ensure that good green projects do not get left behind.

“Nonetheless, this marks the beginning of a new era for investment in sustainable hydropower.”

About climate bonds

The Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) is an international investor-focused and not-for-profit organisation working solely to mobilise the $100tn bond market for climate change solutions. To-date, worldwide green bond issuances have reached over $1tn. To learn more about CBI climate bonds and view the eligibility requirements see: www.climatebonds.net/standard/hydropower.

In order to limit the rise in global temperature to well below two degrees Celsius, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimates worldwide hydropower capacity will need to grow from just over 1,300GW today to reach 2,150GW by 2050. Annual investment in hydropower topped $50bn in 2019, but this is far short of the estimated $100bn required, according to the International Energy Agency.

The Climate Bonds Standard criteria for hydropower stipulates use of two sustainability assessment tools supported by the IHA and a multistakeholder coalition of organisations. These tools are the ESG Gap Analysis Tool for identifying and addressing gaps against recognised good practice across 12 environmental, social and governance assessment topics; and the G-res Tool for reporting the estimated net greenhouse gas emissions of a reservoir.

This article originally appeared in International Water Power & Dam Construction magazine

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That is according to analysis by Wood Mackenzie, which suggests a supercycle is on the way but warns that this time it will be “different from any that have come before”.

The energy researcher claims fossil fuels won’t be in the vanguard and the winners will be the industrial metals needed to electrify society – cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, and aluminium.

“While China’s move to secure battery raw materials is well documented, less well-known is its increasing self-sufficiency extending downstream,” said Simon Morris, Wood Mackenzie’s head of metals.

“75% of global lithium-ion batteries, 70% of all solar panels, and 60% of electric vehicles (EVs) are made in China. But its aspirations have not yet been satisfied and we expect its control to continue to grow.”

Energy transition gathering serious momentum, with commodities supercycle just around the corner

While post-pandemic government stimulus packages have provided a sugar rush for commodities and prices of base metals have surged, this in itself is not supercycle material, according to Wood Mackenzie.

But it said the markets have also sensed that the energy transition is now “gathering serious momentum” and is likely to fuel a sustained increase in demand over the next two decades, supporting a new supercycle narrative.

It is projected $50tn of investment will be needed over the next three decades to achieve a 1.5C global warming trajectory, as outlined in the Paris Agreement.

This will electrify societies’ infrastructure and engineer out the aspects of economic activity that most significantly contribute to carbon emissions, with metals supply set to play a vital role in achieving this.

Wood Mackenzie’s report identifies three potential developments that could challenge how the next commodities supercycle unfolds and who, ultimately, benefits from it.

Firstly, the concentrating control of metals’ supply chains is likely to exclude many from the party.

The systemic supply uncertainty and ensuing price volatility, encouraging disruptive new technologies such as next-generation electrofuels, polymeric energy storage, and cobalt-free batteries – thereby forcing “traditional” commodities into obsolescence.

And finally, the rise of “consumption consciousness”, undermining the long-term reliance on primary metal.

China dominating energy transition value chains

With China dominant in its control of energy transition value chains, non-Chinese entities face an ever-diminishing share of any commodity windfall, according to Morris.

“With greater cash comes greater investment capability, enabling China to realise a strategy of supply security at any cost,” he added.

“Those that choose to participate too late in the cycle – be they nations seeking to secure supply for themselves, customers wanting to protect their production lines, or investors wanting to cash in on supernormal profits – are likely to find that they either can’t afford to participate or are precluded altogether.”

Morris believes price fluctuations could also throw a spanner in the works. He said that with EVs emerging as a “critical source of demand”, metals producers will have to consider how they supply a new type of consumer – one with an “acute focus on price and supply predictability”.

“If EV manufacturers cannot guarantee access to critical metals at an affordable and predictable price, they will look to innovate or thrift them out to the greatest extent possible,” added Morris. “As the supply challenge materialises, the inexorable rise in prices will surely incentivise alternatives.

“As we saw with the increasing rejection of plastic usage, a greater focus on sustainability may see society react against the very considerable rise in the use of primary metals used in cars, mobile phones, telecoms, and infrastructure. Either buying less or demanding greater re-use presents a considerable downside risk for the producers of tomorrow.”

Required increase in metals supply presents challenges for producers and consumers

Wood Mackenzie’s report shows the forces that are shaping up to drive this boom are unique. But even for those commodities stepping into the limelight, it said decarbonisation creates as many risks as it does opportunities.

Under the energy researcher’s proprietary Accelerated Energy Transition-2 (AET-2) scenario, which is consistent with limiting the rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times to 2C, 360 million tonnes (Mt) of aluminium, 90 Mt of copper, and 30 Mt of nickel will feed the energy transition over the next 20 years.

The report notes that this level of additional metal presents obvious challenges for producers and consumers alike.

“As with all commodities, the metals that are key to the transition will have to bring on replacement capacity to replace existing mines as they deplete and close,” said Morris.

“Under our base case, which is broadly consistent with a 2.8-3˚C global warming view, this requirement is manageable. However, under our AET-2 scenario, the new annual installed capacity required becomes eye-watering.

“By 2030, cobalt producers would need to have built 167% more supply than we currently have in our forecast, while copper would need to find 85% more mine supply than in our base-case forecasts. This will present a huge challenge for the sector.”

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