DS Smith sets a single-cloud agenda for sustainability

British multinational packaging giant DS Smith has committed itself to ambitious sustainability goals, and its IT strategy to standardize on a single cloud will be a key enabler.

The London-based industrial manufacturer, which currently runs multiple cloud platforms due to early experimentation and several acquisitions, has opted to consolidate its cloud and data operations onto Amazon Web Services as part of a five-year strategic partnership that coincides with the company’s timeline for replacing plastic materials as much as possible, streamlining its carbon footprint, and vastly reducing the use of water in its manufacturing process — all of which will be fueled significantly by technology and data.

“Historically, we’ve been more multicloud or hybrid cloud, with private services as well,” says Claire Dickson, DS Smith’s CIO. “Much of our digital agenda is around data. Before we were quite fragmented across different technologies. Going into full partnership with AWS is much more of a strategic direction for us because using one stack is the most effective way to do that.”

The 30,000-employee company manufactures fiber-based and recycled paper packaging for large clients, including Amazon, Unilever, and Nestle, at more than 300 manufacturing sites globally, primarily in Europe, though the company has a facility in Atlanta as well.

Its digital transformation began with an application modernization phase, in which Dickson and her IT teams determined which applications should be hosted in the public cloud and which should remain on a private cloud. The migration, still in its early stages, is being designed to benefit from the learned efficiencies, proven sustainability strategies, and advances in data and analytics on the AWS platform over the past decade.

Prague-based IDC analyst Jan Burian believes that DS Smith’s consolidation on AWS will increase the company’s ability to achieve its sustainability goals with greater efficiency.

“From a sustainability perspective, utilizing a cloud platform unlocks the company’s data and its value chain’s data end-to-end,” Burian says. “This enables the company to extract additional value from the data through real-time availability and contextualization. In consequence, there is a direct impact on lower energy costs, a reduction in the carbon footprint, decreased production waste costs, and increased utilization of equipment and workforce through data-driven planning and operations management.”

Laying the data foundation

The four pillars of DS Smith’s digital plan revolved around the management and optimization of data generated by industrial machines, energy providers, its supply chain, and customer experience. The single-cloud platform strategy will include SaaS partners used for automation of more than 40 enterprise applications, Dickson says. Additional applications will be migrated in lift-and-shift fashion while other legacy applications will be rebuilt from scratch. In total, the company’s operations rely on 700 applications.

As an older company with a spate of recent acquisitions, some of the work performed in its hundreds of factories remains manual labor while others are fully automated warehouses with robotics lifting palettes. Enabling consistency in the data sets from these varied sites is integral to DS Smith’s analytics strategy, as well as for anticipated changes in the company’s technology and business models, Dickson says.

“We’re piping data from all these applications into the same environment,” Dickson says of the strategy, noting that data coming from industrial machines, energy providers, business systems, and customers will reside in the same AWS data lakes, which will facilitate deploying AWS data analytics tools — among the first priorities of the company’s digital agenda.

“We collect lots of sensor data on machine performance, vibration data, temperature data, chemical data, and we like to have performative combinations of those datasets,” Dickson says. “Having that data in the cloud and piping it into our data pipelines is a much more effective way to do that.”

Energy optimization is another key aspect of DS Smith’s data and sustainability pipeline, the CIO says.

“We’ve put energy metering in our machines so we can optimize energy consumption and that’s a big, big play for us. We’re looking to use AWS for ESG reporting, which is slightly different depending on the part of the world in which you are operating,” she says. “The data capability in AWS is a key reason for our partnership.”

Aside from being an Amazon supplier, DS Smith’s decision to bet primarily on the cloud provider is typical of many enterprises, and makes sense for a variety of reasons, says IDC’s Burian, including creating a silo-less data environment, offering transparency over data and operational processes, and the ability to harness AWS’s expansive technologies such as IoT, machine learning, data lakes, and analytics services.

“AWS is not just a leader in the cloud-based infrastructure, but it provides a comprehensive set of technology for AI and analytics,” Burian says.

Dickson says that DS Smith also plans to use virtual private clouds for some corporate data, giving it flexibility and control.

Overall, Dickson’s IT agenda for DS Smith mirrors that of most EMEA CIOs, who rank data analytics (30%), application modernization (30%), and cloud (30%) as three of the top five technology initiatives that are driving the most IT investment this year, according to Foundry’s State of the CIO survey.

As for No. 2, machine learning/AI (31%), the packaging company has three use cases in proof of concept. Dickson also has a generative AI agenda under way and is confident that once the company has its data stored universally, and has developed machine learning models, it can then move on to building large language models (LLMs) on AWS that will yield even more productive business outcomes.

Here, Dickson sees data generated from its industrial machines being very productive. “We’re planning to have that fully hosted with us. We’re not giving that data to anybody else, and we’ll be training the generative AI models with our own data sets,” she says.

Purpose-driven IT

Chief among those more productive business outcomes will be achieving DS Smith’s sustainability goals, Dickson says.

To that end,  the company is taking aggressive steps to replace “problem plastics” used in packaging and has developed a 14-day circular process of modeling, designing, manufacturing, and shipping boxes to customers, she says, adding that, as part of its “circular economy” objectives, DS Smith is using video imaging technology to identify plastics in recycled bales and aims to have all its packaging recycled or reused by 2030.

By 2030, the company also aims to send zero waste to the landfill, to decarbonize its operations and value chain, and to limit its global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees in accordance with the Paris Agreement. It also expects to reduce its reliance on natural gas by 25%, which will represent 50,000 tons of CO2 savings annually.

In fact, DS Smith’s commitment to ESG is a key reason the CIO took the job.

“We’ve really got sustainability at the core of what we do,” Dickson says, adding the company announced this fall the launch of its R8 R&D center for developing sustainable packaging. “We’re a very purpose-based company.”