Accelerating digital transformation and supporting sustainable solutions with AWS

Today, we announce Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our preferred cloud provider to help us accelerate innovation, drive efficiencies, and support sustainable solutions.

We will focus on leveraging data to drive growth and efficiency across our business, including real-time monitoring of manufacturing capacity and supply chain management in support of key sustainability targets.

AWS’s global infrastructure, advanced analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies (including AWS’s generative AI services) will help us derive deeper business intelligence, deliver new digital customer experiences, and drive automation at scale across our supply chain.

Specifically, we will be focusing on two key areas:

Building a Data Factory

Building a Data Factory will bring together data from across the business including machinery, facilities, logistics, processes, and products. By applying machine learning algorithms built on AWS, and analytics to this data, we will gain actionable insights and make faster, more informed decisions to optimise operations, anticipate customer demand, and reduce waste and carbon emissions.

Real-time monitoring of our manufacturing capacity and supply chain

Real-time monitoring of our manufacturing capacity and supply chain will provide a holistic end-to-end view. This will enable an increasingly agile and responsive approach to supply chain management, for example by anticipating and addressing machine downtime using predictive maintenance.

To help achieve this, we will work with AWS to conduct an AWS Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) and provide AWS cloud skills training and development programmes. Examples include cloud-based 3D racing simulator AWS DeepRacer, gamified, collaborative learning through AWS GameDay, and problem solving via AWS Jams.

Our journey to the future is already underway and AWS has a huge role to play. Digital and data solutions are going to revolutionise the way we grow, delight and support our customers and tackle some of our planet’s biggest sustainability challenges.

Claire Dickson
Group Chief Information Officer, DS Smith

Our business has changed dramatically over the last decade. It could be unrecognizable within another.

Claire Dickson
Group Chief Information Officer, DS Smith

Moving to AWS will enable DS Smith to accelerate transformation and innovation by increasingly putting data at the heart of its business.

Jeff Johnson
General Manager UKI, AWS

We are proud to support DS Smith on their cloud migration journey, and to help them build and deliver innovative solutions that will form the foundation of the future of supply chains and manufacturing.

Jeff Johnson
General Manager UKI, AWS

Circularity sits at the heart of our business model and is core to our purpose to Redefine Packaging for a Changing World. The collaboration with AWS will support key elements of our Now & Next Sustainability Strategy, which focuses on: 

  • Circularity - Designing out waste and pollution, and keeping materials in use
  • Carbon - Decarbonising our operations and value chain
  • People & Communities - Creating a safe, diverse, and inclusive workplace and being active in our communities
  • Nature - Protecting and regenerating nature

As part of Now & Next, we have committed to reach Net Zero GHG emissions by 2050, and to an ambitious 1.5°C science-based target to reduce Scope 1, 2 and 3 GHG emissions by 46% by 2030 compared to 2019*. 

Data is a key ingredient to delivering these goals, and AWS will help bring together data about machinery, facilities, logistics, people, processes and products to support the business in assessing where it can become more efficient – cutting waste and reducing carbon emissions. 

*The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) validated DS Smith’s 1.5°C science-based target, to reduce Scope 1, 2 and 3 GHG emissions by 46% by 2030 compared to 2019 and to reach Net Zero GHG emissions by 2050.