Asahi Kasei is further intensifying its focus on achieving a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions within the scope of its Green Transformation ambitions formulated in its new medium-term management plan, announced on April 11, 2022.
Next to decreasing the GHG emissions generated as a result of its production processes, the company is now also seeking to measure and map the carbon footprint of a range of performance plastics which it produces. It intends to provide this information to customers downstream in the supply chain to promote decarbonisation across the supply chain.
These plastics - Leona Tenac, Tenac-C, Xyron, and Thermylene - are widely used in applications varying from automotive structural parts to electrical equipment and consumer electronics.
Asahi Kasei’s performance plastics business has more than ten manufacturing sites and sales sites worldwide for each and provides products and technical service to customers around the world. As the supply chain is complex, involving various sites, obtaining detailed management information such as budgets, actual results, and forecasts, as well as CFP for each final product in an integrated format from production to sale proved to be difficult.
Asahi Kasei had already collaborated with NTT Data on the establishment of a platform enabling Asahi Kasei’s performance materials business to capture comprehensive management information globally in fiscal 2020. This platform has now been expanded to include data on the carbon footprint of these performance products.
The platform was first used for this purpose earlier this month, and Asahi Kasei expects to start providing data on the carbon footprint of its products (CFP) in May 2022.
The CFP of each material procured from upstream suppliers is added to the GHG emissions calculated proportionally in outsourced processing and in-house manufacturing processes. This yields a CFP that includes the supply chain from upstream to manufacturing and shipment.
Business-planning software from Anaplan enables the company to calculate the CFP for each final product, despite the fact that the performance plastics supply chain is a complex one, with many different product grades, manufacturing sites spread around the world, and numerous production process steps.
An advantage of building on a previously existing management information platform is the possibility of analysing cost and CFP together from various perspectives, such as by final product or by customer. These analyses are visualised using the business intelligence tool Tableau, enabling CFP reduction as well as proposals demonstrating the balance between cost and CFP to customers.