On November 2, an article on the theory page of Guangming Daily conveyed a piece of information: seven departments, including the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, jointly issued the Implementation Plan for Promoting the Coordinated Development of Digital and Green Transformation (2026–2030).
In the title, the six characters “digitalization and greenization synergy” have appeared many times in official documents. But this time the focus is very concrete—so concrete that people working on the factory floor can feel the pain.
The old hassle: two teams, two sets of materials, two rounds of investment
Any enterprise that has gone through the application process for smart factory and green factory certification understands this process.
That smart factory line falls under the industry and information technology authorities. Materials required: equipment networking rate, numerical control rate, MES coverage rate, system integration level, and number of data collection points.
The green factory track falls under the Development and Reform and Ecology and Environment authorities. Materials are also required: comprehensive energy consumption per unit product, carbon emission intensity, clean energy share, comprehensive utilization rate of solid waste, and recovered waste heat volume.
Two tracks, two time windows, two sets of third-party agencies, and two groups of people preparing materials. What is even more troublesome is the on-site retrofit—in order to pass the smart factory assessment, a batch of sensors and data collection gateways was installed; in order to pass the green factory assessment, another energy consumption monitoring system was installed. Equipment was purchased repeatedly, data followed two sets of definitions, and when checked at year-end, the numbers still did not match.
This is exactly what the new plan intends to change.
Three “Mutual Recognitions”
The document states: The construction of smart factories should incorporate energy efficiency and carbon emission indicators into the evaluation system, and the green factory standards should include digital management capabilities. At the same time, intelligent transformation and green transformation can be completed on the same project and the same production line, with results mutually recognized.
Going one layer deeper: promote the standards systems for smart manufacturing and green manufacturing to align and mutually recognize each other on energy efficiency, carbon accounting, and data interfaces.
The weight of these three sentences lies in that they connect two originally parallel administrative systems. Enterprises will no longer need to do it twice in the future, but they must clearly articulate both objectives at the same time within one project.
Why this ultimately lands on ERP
Carbon accounting sounds like a matter for environmental protection departments, but it is actually a matter of data.
Calculating a product's carbon emissions isn't complicated: convert the energy and materials used during a given period into carbon emissions, then divide by the qualified output during that same period. The numerator is consumption, and the denominator is production.
The problem is, where do these two numbers come from.
Numerator: electricity, water, steam, natural gas, compressed air, and the embodied carbon of key raw materials. These figures are scattered across electricity meters, water meters, boiler room logs, and procurement invoices.
Denominator: qualified output. This number is in the ERP work order, in the quality inspection sheet, and in the goods receipt.
I've seen companies conduct carbon inventories where two dedicated staff were shut in a meeting room for two weeks, consolidating the forms submitted by the workshop into Excel. When they finished, they didn't even dare to sign off themselves—because the numbers didn't reconcile. January's output was calculated based on warehousing, February's based on sales, and for March the workshop reported an estimate. Once the denominator gets messed up, carbon emissions per unit of product are completely wrong, and all subsequent indicators drift along with it.
What is more troublesome is the audit. When a third party comes to verify and asks, "How were the carbon emissions for this batch calculated?", if you cannot answer "How much electricity and material did this batch use, and how many qualified products did it produce?", the documentation will not pass. And these three numbers happen to be the three most basic documents in ERP and MES: material requisition slips, work orders, and quality inspection slips.
On AI, the direction given is quite practical
The plan mentions organizing and implementing joint research on "AI + Green and Low-Carbon," and identifies three directions: intelligent energy-carbon management and control, industrial energy-saving models, and intelligent dispatch of green electricity.
The first two are most closely related to manufacturing enterprises.
Energy and carbon intelligent management and control, put simply, means collecting energy consumption data in real time, breaking it down by production line and shift, and automatically alarming on anomalies. Industrial energy-saving models optimize after enough data has accumulated—which air compressor should be stopped, which line's drying temperature can be lowered by five degrees, and how to schedule production under peak-valley electricity prices to save the most money.
The prerequisites for all of these are the same: metering points must be clearly defined, and data must be entered into the system.
I once came across an injection molding company whose owner always felt the electricity bill was high but couldn't say where the high usage was coming from. Later, the workshop was divided into six metering points, and within a week it became clear: the electricity consumed during the standby heating periods by two old injection molding machines in Workshop No. 3 accounted for 18% of the whole plant's usage, and there was no production scheduled during those periods at all. This one item alone saved more in electricity costs in a year than applying for any subsidy.
This is also what I want to say: the greatest benefit of digital-green synergy lies not in subsidies, but in costs.
A practical checklist for businesses
If you intend to act according to the new plan's approach, it is recommended to follow this order.
Step one: create a list of metering points. Which workshop, which production line, which piece of equipment, what meter is installed, which system the data goes into, and what the sampling frequency is. Once this table is done, you will know how much of your data foundation is actually real.
Second, standardize the production output definition. The ERP goods receipt quantity, the MES work reporting quantity, and the workshop team records—these three numbers must reconcile. If they don't reconcile, solve this first; don't rush to roll out the carbon platform.
Step three: attach energy consumption data to work orders. Only when it is attached to a work order can you calculate energy consumption per unit of product; if it cannot be attached to a work order, you can only calculate the plant-wide monthly average, and that number cannot be used to make any decisions.
Fourth step, then discuss the application. At this point, the “data collection coverage rate” required by the smart factory and the “energy consumption intensity” required by the green factory are two facets of the same batch of data, so producing two reports is quick.
A reminder
The level of the “three transformations” should also be incorporated into industrial development evaluation—this is a hard statement in the document. It means that in the future, when local areas evaluate industries, industrial parks, and enterprises, digitalization and greening are indicators in the same basket.
The practical impact on the enterprise is: these two things will have to be done sooner or later; doing them separately costs twice as much, while doing them together requires only one investment. There is no need to hesitate about which to choose.
First get the meters installed and the data connected. As for the rest, the data will speak for itself.
