Taking steps for lasting transformation

At Bosch Rexroth, we’re systematically making our own factories and operations more sustainable – for example, by enhancing our energy efficiency. This contributes to reducing the carbon footprint of our products. We also offer energy-efficient products and solutions that demonstrate that sustainability and economic success can go hand-in-hand. Because they use less energy and resources, they’re more beneficial to the environment and help customers to reduce costs. In addition, our products and solutions target among others higher productivity, easier implementation, and greater flexibility.

Incorporating circular economy principles into the design of our products is an important part of our drive towards more sustainable manufacturing, too. So we consider how we improve the use of materials, our production processes, and how we can make our products more durable to give them a longer life span. We’re also offering repair and remanufacturing services to help preserve the lives of machines and reduce the use of raw materials.

I had a good childhood and I want that for my own children. It’s not just about making things better for my generation, it’s about the next generation and those after that. We have a responsibility to look after the environment for future generations.

My role at Bosch Rexroth is all about providing longevity in mobile machines. This includes considering their durability, maintaining them so they don’t need to be replaced, and transforming old machines to the new age of digitalization. I define the strategy for the team, but I like to provide a vision or a framework, rather than specific targets – this enables them to think creatively about how they can contribute.

I talk to a lot of customers as part of my role – many of them are concerned about climate change too. So I’m pleased that I can tell them about our innovative technologies that contribute to a better future. The products we’re developing now will be used in machines in the future for quite some time and have the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of the machines. If I didn’t think we could make a positive impact, I wouldn’t do this job.

I’m particularly interested in any initiative that helps us to preserve resources. It’s something that we’re passionate about at Bosch Rexroth. So we try to repair rather than replace our equipment in our own factories. And we also offer this to our customers: providing a sustainable alternative to buying new.

Firstly, we design products with longevity in mind, so they have a long life span to start with. But when they do reach the end of their natural life, we prefer to look at how they can be repaired, rather than replaced, to give them more time in use. Importantly, we do this without lowering the quality.

We offer our customers training, so they can recognize a fault and do their own repairs. Or we can do the repair for them. And by servicing machines regularly, we can help to prolong the life of a machine even further.

We need to end our throw-away culture and to do this, we have to change people’s mindsets. One of the great pleasures of my job is explaining the benefits of repair over replace to our customers and seeing how pleased they are when they realize this doesn’t have to mean a compromise in quality.

We’re already seeing this starting to happen – they’ll become more connected and more autonomous. Connectivity is important because it enhances efficiency and means that mobile machines have the potential to use less resources. Not just for an individual machine but for multiple machines working together – for example, on a construction site.

Autonomy is also important because it will help to make them more energy efficient. For instance, think of the number of times a person would brake and accelerate when making a difficult maneuver in a vehicle. When some of this effort becomes autonomous, mobile machines can operate more smoothly, and this makes them more energy efficient.

In addition to thinking about how we use the resources we have, we think about using alternative resources, such as electricity. This is now possible with our eLION high voltage solution portfolio. It’s a modular portfolio, developed specifically for the off-highway sector. It includes high-voltage electric motors and inverters, gearboxes, as well as onboard chargers, cables, software and coordinated hydraulics.

Electrifying mobile machines has obvious environmental benefits – like reducing exhaust and noise emissions at the operation site. At the same time, it increases performance, and lowers operational costs (depending on cost for diesel and electricity). When comparing a diesel-powered excavator with conventional hydraulics with an electric-powered excavator with optimized hydraulics, we calculated 40% of energy savings achievement due to improved efficiency on our demonstrator machine.

As with all our developments, we’ve listened to our customers – and we strive to deliver energy and resource efficient solutions that have additional, tangible business benefits.