CEO Speaks at European Manufacturing Conference
Our CEO Ruth Kearney will speak at the 2024 European Manufacturing Conference to be held in Brussels this month. The sold out event organised by three major manufacturing ecosystems including EFFRA, EIT Manufacturing and ManuFutureThe brings together key players in the European manufacturing industry, including policymakers, industry representatives, as well as academia, research & technology organisations, startups, scaleups and innovators.
 Nightingale HQ CEO will join a panel discussion on Achieving Sustainable Manufacturing - How close are We? with Philipp Horner Chief Sustainability Officer at Voestalpine High Performance Metals, Bozorg Khanbaei Policy Officer at BEPA Association and José Carlos Caldeira Advisor to the Chairperson at INESC TEC). Chaired by Enrico Callegati R&D Funding Manager at IMA Group.
Ruth will share insights into Nightingale HQ journey into developing under Greener Software Principles and what it means to be a technology partner in the manufacturing supply chain. Their solution reduces scrap and CO2 within the steel sector but they are developing under greener software principles and attempting to be more carbon aware in their approach. She will talk about the challenge, the mindset and the tools to deliver on more sustainable manufacturing sooner.
FAQs
Why does sustainable manufacturing require honesty about the challenge?
The panel topic — “Achieving Sustainable Manufacturing - How close are We?” — is deliberately challenging. It is not a panel about the vision for sustainable manufacturing. It is a panel about where the sector actually is, how much progress has been made, and what it realistically takes to get to where it needs to be.
For Ruth Kearney, the honest answer involves acknowledging that sustainable manufacturing is hard, that the technology exists to make significant progress, and that the gap between aspiration and reality in most manufacturing businesses is significant. Nightingale HQ’s role is to help close that gap with practical tools that work in real production environments.
What are greener software principles in practice?
One of the distinctive aspects of Ruth’s presentation was the focus on how Nightingale HQ itself operates under greener software principles — not just building tools that help customers reduce emissions, but thinking about the carbon footprint of the software itself. This includes being carbon aware in infrastructure choices, understanding the emissions associated with cloud computing, and designing software that minimises unnecessary computation.
This is an emerging discipline in software engineering, and being carbon aware is particularly relevant for an AI company whose tools process significant amounts of data. Nightingale HQ’s commitment to applying greener software principles to its own products reflects the belief that technology companies cannot credibly advocate for sustainability in manufacturing while ignoring their own environmental impact.