Sustainability can work hand in hand with finance

Even while operating a fleet of around 750,000 vehicles, $3 billion global mobility solutions company Vontier was able to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 40% between 2020 and 2024. And some surprisingly small steps allowed it to achieve that milestone.

Vontier’s chief sustainability officer and chief administrative officer, Katie Rowen, spoke with CFO Brew at GreenBiz 25 about how lowering emissions can be simpler than it looks, and how finance and sustainability functions can better support each other’s work.

Get input from the ground up: Vontier follows Kaizen methodology, Rowen said. In 2023, it held Kaizen events with staff in both North America and India to brainstorm ways to reduce emissions while lowering costs and improving efficiency. Employees welcomed the chance to provide input, Rowen said: “They’re passionate about the subject, usually; they’re excited to make a difference and reduce our emissions.”

Rowen also met with fleet drivers and customers in Australia and New Zealand, who provided some valuable feedback. The drivers made one simple but powerful suggestion for lowering fuel costs: keeping their tires inflated. Often, drivers will ignore the tire check light when it first goes on, Rowen said. But “when you look at all the line-item ways to save fuel, the difference that actually makes is enormous,” she said.

Other ideas drivers suggested included keeping up with maintenance and making better use of the dispatch system to make routes more efficient. In total, Rowan said, “they found virtually no-cost ways to reduce annual liters of fuel by around 80,000. But what’s really cool is then they also find ways to increase safety for the drivers and response times for our customers. So it’s just win, win, win.”

Finance and sustainability can learn from each other: Both the finance and sustainability functions “have such an opportunity to educate each other,” Rowen said. Finance teams have a wealth of experience around data, she said. Sustainability teams can learn from the “processes, internal controls, and data maturity that finance has in their DNA.”

Likewise, she said, sustainability teams can alert finance to opportunities to not only reduce emissions but “save money and drive business strategy,” she said. She suggests companies ensure that “there’s some mechanism for those two functions to become more coordinated.”