Sustainability, customers and employees

Sustainability shift

Mining and infrastructure are heavy energy consumers, providing Sandvik with a big opportunity to help its customers’ operations be more sustainable. We are doing this through continuously making improvements to our offering to reduce the energy used per ton of material crushed at the customer site.

We already provide fully electrified stationary crushing equipment and our focus now is on the electrification of our mobile crushing equipment. In 2022 we enabled our mobile crushers and screens to be operated with HVO (renewable diesel). We are progressing to plan towards our target to have an electric option for 90 percent of the mobile offering by 2025.

We launched a new, all electric wheeled range of crushing and screening solutions for the North American market. The offering will expand into a complete range, including jaw crushers, impactors and cone crushers. Sandvik electric-powered wheeled crushers offer a low operational cost per ton, reduce CO₂ emissions and make our customers more sustainable.

We also have the ambition to expand in the value chain and reduce downstream high energy consuming processes through fine crushing solutions.

We continuously work with our own processes in our manufacturing sites to reduce our emissions and improve recycling and reuse in the factories. After earlier having connected the heat recovery system in our main manufacturing facility in Svedala to the site’s ventilation system, we also installed a process heating system to reuse excessive heat from production processes. In 2022 we developed the solution further to recover even more excessive heat.

Customer’s first choice

Our solutions bring value to our customers by increasing their productivity, safety and sustainability while also reducing costs.

Sandvik® QA452, a tracked mobile, 3-deck sizing screen, is the latest evolution of doublescreen technology, which typically outperforms traditional screens by up to 30 percent.

We are improving communication with our customers within our direct channels so that sales teams can ensure that customers feel prioritized and that we find solutions to their issues. In our indirect channels we are training our partners to become more knowledgeable about our equipment and service offerings so they can better support customers and solve customer problems with our solutions.

We have started a more methodical way of measuring customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score. As we gain more insights we continuously increase our understanding and interaction with our customers, which enables us to create more value for our customers based on their needs.

Agile through cycle

An increased focus on strategic risk management helped us prepare for the challenging world events, such as inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions, that affected our business throughout 2022. We worked on a resilient top line, for example by growing sales in parts, services and consumables, including the acquisition of SP Mining.

We have also developed more flexible supply chains. Multiple supply chains, regional supply hubs and flexible insourcing and outsourcing are some of the tools we work with.

Employer of choice

With new digital technologies driving progress in our industry we need additional types of talent and competences. Sustainability is a key focus area for current and future employees.

We invest in continuous training and development for our employees to enable their ambitions for the future, whether those are to become certified service technicians, certified sales engineers or to undertake leadership training. This year, we have focused on improving development plans.

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) plays an important role in the success of our organization and all employees have a part in strengthening an inclusive culture. Examples of activities undertaken in 2022 are teams setting D&I targets together, starting with the Business Area Management Team and the establishment of an annual D&I award for initiatives that drive improvement.

We also concluded the first round of our two-way mentorship program in which about 30 mentor/mentee pairs have challenged each other, networked and gained new perspectives over a nine month period. We have now launched the second round of the program.

Psychological safety is another area that we believe is key for being an employer of choice and which creates benefits all the way to the customer. This year we have started a pilot training for managers in psychological safety.