Making Sustainability Count in Service: From Vision Statements to Operational Reality

The panel discussion at Sustainability in Service 2025 – Power of 50, featuring Petra Popp, Göran Olsson, Thomas Lindahl, and Lisa Hellqvist, explored how sustainability can be translated from top-level ambition into tangible, profitable action in service operations.

Sustainability in service is no longer a separate initiative. It is a commercial lens, a design principle, a data challenge, and a storytelling task. And it requires service leaders to step out of modesty and into strategic influence.

From Corporate Ambition to Frontline Reality

Many industrial companies today can point to a 200–400 page sustainability report, complete with Scope 1 and Scope 2 plans, long-term targets, and board-level commitments. For service organisations, the problem is not ambition, but the execution of ambition into the daily realities of technicians, planners, and customer-facing teams.

Corporate sustainability strategies are defined at the top but operationalised in the field, where uptime, cost, efficiency, resource use, and customer expectations intersect. It is here that sustainability becomes real, measurable, and commercial.

• Service needs its own sustainability agenda. Most companies have an overall sustainability strategy. Fewer have a clear sustainability strategy for service, with defined priorities, metrics, and responsibilities.
• Translation beats abstraction. Frontline teams need sustainability framed in terms they work with every day: fewer emergency shipments, higher first-time fix rates, reduced scrap, more uptime, longer asset life. These are already core service imperatives. The missing piece is connecting them to the sustainability narrative.
• Measurement is non-negotiable. Service leaders need KPIs that capture both operational and environmental outcomes, integrated into how success is managed and communicated.

If sustainability remains owned by central functions, service will remain a reporting source rather than a strategic driver. The shift happens when service is explicitly recognised as a primary contributor to sustainability goals and is equipped accordingly.

Service Is Already Delivering Sustainability, But Rarely Telling the Story

Service organisations already do a great deal that contributes directly to environmental performance, such as extending asset life, optimising maintenance, reducing downtime, improving energy efficiency, avoiding waste, and enabling refurbishment and remanufacturing.

Panelists noted that service is often too modest. Sustainability and service are treated as parallel topics rather than being consciously linked. Presentations, proposals, and business cases emphasise uptime, yield, and cost, but not emissions avoided, material saved, or lifetime extended.

Internally, without a sustainability narrative, service will struggle to gain recognition as a key lever in achieving corporate ESG targets. Investment, prioritisation, and organisational attention will gravitate elsewhere.

Externally, customers are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate their own ESG progress. Service providers that can quantify and articulate their contribution to those goals will strengthen their positioning, justify premium offerings, and differentiate beyond price.

Reframing existing activities through a sustainability lens is a low-risk, high-impact starting point. It does not require new technologies or radical business model changes. It requires leaders to:

• Inventory what service is already doing that reduces waste, energy, and resource use.
• Translate those outcomes into environmental impact where possible.
• Integrate this narrative into sales materials, service catalogues, and performance reviews.

In many cases, it is a question of rebranding and repackaging circular, refurbishment, upgrade, and life-extension offerings in a way that makes their sustainability contribution explicit, not implicit.

Start with the Customer, Not the Report

Sustainability in service must begin with the customer, not with internal assumptions or static ESG documentation.

Customers differ markedly in their priorities. Some are driven almost exclusively by cost. Others have ambitious decarbonisation targets and are actively seeking partners to help them achieve them. Attempting to push the same sustainability message to every customer is inefficient at best and counterproductive at worst.

A more effective approach is to systematically understand:

• What sustainability targets are customers working toward?
• How are they measured and reported internally?
• What expectations do they have of their service partners?
• How do they rate existing partners in terms of contribution to their sustainability agenda?

Several organisations are now treating this as a formal exercise by running structured customer surveys or interviews in collaboration with their sustainability teams to:

• Align with the customer’s language and metrics so that any improvements can be transparently demonstrated and signed off by both sides.
• Focus efforts on those customers where there is genuine interest and readiness, rather than spending scarce resources educating or convincing those who are not yet engaged.

This customer-first orientation also changes how value is defined. It reinforces that value is in the eye of the beholder. No matter how sophisticated an internal sustainability KPI framework may be, it will only gain traction if it maps to what the customer actually cares about and is accountable for.

Digital Capabilities: Powerful, But Not the Whole Story

Digitalisation emerged as both an enabler and a risk. An enabler, because remote services, IoT, predictive maintenance, and AI-driven optimisation help do more with less, fewer site visits, fewer breakdowns, less wasted material, and smarter deployment of technicians and spare parts. A risk, because there is a growing tendency to equate sustainability progress with digitalisation alone.

Several digital capabilities stand out for their immediate impact:

• Remote services and predictive maintenance reduce unnecessary travel and unplanned downtime, leading to lower emissions and higher asset productivity.
• Optimised spare parts planning ensures the right part is in the right place at the right time, avoiding emergency shipments and excessive inventory. When combined with machine learning and external data (for example, weather or commodity price fluctuations), this becomes a powerful lever for both cost and emissions reduction.
• Intelligent pricing can be used as an environmental tool, not just a revenue lever, for instance, making greener options more attractive or incentivising choices that avoid urgent, high-footprint logistics.
• Data visibility and reporting capabilities enable service providers to supply customers with environmental performance reports that they struggle to assemble themselves, strengthening the relationship and embedding service deeper into customers’ ESG reporting chains.

Yet, digital tools are not a silver bullet. Many sustainability improvements do not depend on advanced technology — redesigning service processes, extending asset life, improving planning, or introducing refurbishment paths. Over-indexing on digitalisation risks neglecting these more accessible opportunities.

Servitization, Risk, and the Incentive to Do More with Less

Outcome-based and servitized business models remain a stated ambition for many industrial organisations. Moving from transactional spare parts and break-fix services to uptime or performance-based contracts promises more predictable revenue streams and deeper customer relationships. It also has important sustainability implications.

Servitized models shift incentives fundamentally. When a provider is paid for outcomes rather than transactions, minimising waste, failures, and unnecessary interventions is economically essential. Every avoided breakdown, every extended component life, every optimisation directly protects margin.

This alignment between economics and sustainability is powerful, but the transition is complex:

• It challenges existing profit pools. Many industrial firms rely on high-margin spare parts businesses. There is understandable resistance to any model that appears to cannibalise those revenues.
• It shifts internal power structures. Moving margin and accountability from one part of the organisation to another changes who controls key financial levers, which can trigger organisational friction.
• It requires confidence in control. Without connected machines and robust data, many organisations perceive outcome-based contracts as too risky. They lack visibility into asset behaviour and performance.

Despite these barriers, there is growing recognition that clinging to a model based on selling as many parts as possible is not sustainable, commercially or environmentally. It may protect earnings for a few years, but it ultimately undermines competitiveness, especially as customers demand total cost of ownership optimisation and transparent ESG contributions.

The pragmatic path forward is not a wholesale overnight shift, but:

• Piloting servitized or outcome-based models in selected niches or product lines where risk is manageable and customer demand is strong.
• Maintaining capabilities for both contract-based and break-fix models, recognising that not all customers or assets will transition at once.
• Using pilots to build internal experience, refine risk models, and strengthen the business case.

Outcome-based contracts also create internal pressure to get the basics right. Inventory, logistics, data quality, and service processes must be robust. Servitization is not a substitute for operational excellence. It depends on it.

The Untapped Strategic Role of Service Data

Data emerged as a recurring pain point and opportunity throughout the event, referred to as data spaghetti and silos across warranty, supply chain, service, and engineering. This affects both sustainability and profitability.

When service data is not systematically connected to supply chain, engineering, or sustainability functions:

• Campaigns are launched without stock availability, leading to delays, emergency shipments, and unnecessary emissions.
• Refurbishment and remanufacturing opportunities are missed because parts flows and asset histories are opaque.
• Sustainability reporting is decoupled from operational reality, weakening internal credibility and missing improvement opportunities.

However, when data is consolidated and placed in context, it becomes a basis for entirely new value:

• Feeding back warranty and field performance data into supply chain planning and engineering decisions.
• Systematically managing returns flows to support circular models.
• Building digital passports or asset histories that enable compliance, traceability, and advanced service offerings.
• Providing customers with reliable, jointly agreed performance and environmental metrics.

Not every organisation must immediately invest in a sophisticated, AI-enabled analytics stack. However, reliable, connected, and trusted data is a prerequisite for any serious attempt to measure and then monetise sustainability performance in service.

Next-Generation Expectations: Sustainability as a Condition, Not a Differentiator

Younger generations entering the workforce are not treating sustainability as a peripheral concern or headquarters hobby. For them, it is a baseline expectation of employers, products, and services. This carries important implications for:

• Talent attraction and retention. Industrial firms that treat sustainability as a checkbox are likely to struggle to attract and keep the skills they need, especially in digital, engineering, and commercial roles.
• Commercial positioning. Over time, sustainability will cease to be a differentiator and become a minimum requirement. Organisations that embed it now in offerings, contracts, and operations will be better placed when regulations tighten and customer expectations harden.
• Organisational pressure. Internal demand for substantive sustainability action will increasingly come from below as well as above. Service organisations should anticipate and harness this, rather than resist it.

This generational shift reinforces the need to move beyond rhetoric and into concrete, measurable change, and to empower service as a visible driver of that change.

From Talking to Doing: Priorities for the Next 12–24 Months

It is time to stop over-theorising and start acting. Perfection is not a prerequisite for progress. For service and aftermarket leaders, several priorities stand out as particularly actionable in the near term:

1. Build a service-specific sustainability narrative

Inventory existing service activities that reduce waste, energy, material, or emissions. Quantify impact where possible, even if approximated initially. Rework internal and external materials to explicitly connect these activities to sustainability outcomes.

2. Engage customers systematically on sustainability

Move beyond isolated conversations. Use structured surveys, interviews, or account reviews to understand customers’ sustainability targets, metrics, and expectations of service partners. Identify which customers are most ready to collaborate and prioritise efforts there.

3. Connect data and close internal silos

Identify key data sources across warranty, service, parts, and operations. Begin the work of consolidating and contextualising them, even if only for a subset of assets or customers. Focus less on building the perfect architecture and more on enabling a few high-value use cases.

4. Pilot outcome-based or circular models on a small scale

Select a product line, region, or customer segment where appetite and feasibility are high. Pilot an outcome-based contract, refurbishment program, or circular service offering. Measure not only financial results but also sustainability impact, and develop case studies that can be used to gain internal and external support.

5. Use digital tools to eliminate waste, but do not wait for perfection

Deploy remote services, predictive maintenance, and AI-enabled optimisation where the business case is clear. Focus on concrete outcomes, such as reduced travel, fewer emergency shipments, higher first-time fix, and longer asset life. Treat digital capabilities as enablers of sustainability and profitability, not as independent objectives.

6. Give service a seat at the strategic table

Sustainability, product-as-a-service, and circularity cannot be designed purely in corporate strategy or engineering. Service must be present when business models, digital roadmaps, and compliance responses are defined. Without this, the risk is that service is left to make it work after the fact, with higher cost and lower impact.

Service as the Missing Link in Industrial Sustainability

The industrial sector is under mounting pressure to decarbonise, reduce waste, and operate more responsibly while maintaining profitability and competitiveness. For many organisations, the conversation still starts with factories, energy, and materials. Yet it is in service and aftermarket operations that some of the most immediate, measurable, and commercially attractive sustainability gains can be realised.

Service is where products meet reality, where they fail, are repaired, upgraded, optimised, and ultimately retired or re-entered into the value chain. It is where data on actual performance is generated, where customers experience value, and where recurring revenue is built.

When sustainability is integrated into how service is designed, delivered, measured, and sold, it ceases to be a compliance cost and becomes a growth driver. That requires a shift in mindset, from modesty to narrative, from reporting to partnering, from digital as buzzword to digital as waste-eliminator, and from defending today’s profit pools to building tomorrow’s business models.

The organisations that succeed will be those that make sustainability count in service, not as an add-on, but as a core dimension of operational excellence and customer value.