Verdantix Announces Winners Of Its Innovation Excellence Awards

Verdantix Announces Winners Of Its Innovation Excellence Awards

Leading independent research and advisory firm Verdantix has announced the 11 winners of its Innovation Excellence Awards which recognise outstanding achievements in EHS, ESG, Sustainability and Operations.

The awards, which celebrate the technology pioneers that are defining best practices through applied innovation, attracted a record number of global entries with companies from as far afield as Vietnam, Australia and India taking part.

Winners range from multinational giants such as Unilever and Danone to smaller companies and family-owned businesses, such as Lorenz Meters, with new categories in the awards including Pandemic Risk Management, Enterprise Carbon Management and ESG Metrics and Reporting.

David Metcalfe, CEO at Verdantix said: “The awards demonstrate the importance of sharing best practices to the industry and this year’s winners have delivered genuinely outstanding technological innovations. The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised the need to focus on EHS and ESG and that has been reflected in the record number of entries we received this year.”

The winners in the 11 categories are:

• Lorenz Meters won Circular Economy Tech Enablement with its project to quantify the environmental and economic performance of their circular economy business model, which reduced the carbon footprint of its circular product solution by over 90% and reduced the cost of the development and manufacturing of its solutions by 50%
• Danone won EHS Compliance Digitization with its project which, as part of its digitalisation ambition to become a 100% paperless factory, digitises their permit to work process and provides comprehensivereports enabling management to identify what is working correctly and what can be improved
• Anglian Water won Enterprise Carbon Management with its carbon reduction project which enabled the company to exceed its 2020 net zero goals and drive down capital carbon by 61% against 2010 baselines
• Cognizant won ESG Metrics and Reporting with its project which automates ESG data, provides full visibility and an audit trail, eliminates the risk of manual work and human error, and increased confidence in the robustness of control and governance processes
• Delek won Integrated Process Safety Management with its digital Permit to Work and risk assessment solution which has improved accessibility of permits, real-time identification of permit conflicts, and the ability to effectively suspend work and resolve issues, resulting in reduced work incidents and annual contract labor savings of almost $2 million
• Incitec Pivot Ltd won Operational Risk Management with its project which has seen an 80% reduction in time spent by employees on aggregating data and generating insights, a53% decrease year-on-year in total recordable injury frequency rate and a 39% reduction over a two-year period in significant event frequency rate
• West Fraser won Pandemic Risk Management with its project which enabled the company to avoid a minimum of 18 shutdown-inducing events and saw a 20% reduction in downtime during the pandemic by implementing technology which ensured social distancing and provided track and trace reports on Covid exposures
• PGS won Safety Performance Improvement with its incident management tool that utilises AI to identify trends, automate alerts and proactively prevent incidents
• Trane US won Supplier Assurance & Contractor Risk with a project which automated and centralised their subcontractor qualification process across all 126 North American offices, improving qualification process time by 79%
• Natural Capital Laboratory in association with The Lifescape Project and University of Cumbria won Sustainability Strategy Implementation with its project setting up the world’s first ‘Natural Capital Laboratory’ in the Highlands of Scotland. The project is ‘rewilding’ 100 acres of degraded land and pioneering research
• Unilever won Worker Wellbeing & Ergonomics with its health and wellbeing project enabling it to better visualise and monitor health trends globally and by region helping the business to make more intelligent, data-driven decisions on where best to invest to deliver true health benefits to its 100,000+ employees

In addition to the organizations who have invested in innovative projects, the awards highlight the contribution of supporting technology and consulting firms, AECOM, Appruv, Cognite, Copperleaf, Cority, GOARC, Guardhat, SAI360, Sphera, VelocityEHS, Workiva.

The winners’ ceremony will be held as part of the Verdantix Innovating for Sustainable Operations Summit taking in Austin, Texas, 25^th to 26^th October 2022. Register here.