Energy management for manufacturing

Agreed supply capacity (ASC) monitoring

In an effort to reduce the costs they pay for their energy and grid connection, one of our manufacturing customer’s energy manager was asked to investigate whether reducing their agreed supply capacity to a lower threshold was possible and whether it would financially benefit them, or whether they would end up being penalised for regularly exceeding their agreed supply capacity (the amount of power they can draw from the grid at any given time).

Optimum’s out of the box tool for undertaking load analysis allowed the customer to answer this question a in minutes. By simply logging in and clicking a few times, they were able to find their site and analyse their load. Optimum’s integration to their supplier’s systems also allowed pre-population of their existing ASC. The energy manager was then able to add a simple threshold line 'Proposed agreed supply capacity' and could immediately see that there was going to be an issue with reducing their agreed supply capacity to the proposed level. 

The proposed ASC is too low and the energy manager can clearly see that they will breach this threshold on every single day of the week due to their 24/7 production patterns – based on the past year’s data. He was clearly able to recommend not reducing the ASC as the cost in penalties would outweigh any savings for reducing their ASC.

Our customer’s energy manager was able to save hours on the analysis of their agreed supply capacity. They didn’t have to contact their energy supplier to ask for data, wait for standard response times, or have to manually manipulate any data in excel. The customer was able to use the download icons to share the graphics directly to their internal stakeholders. This was a great example of how using Optimum to undertake analysis can help customers save time and money and make better and faster decisions, informed by data.

Asset connectivity status

In operationally critical environments such as manufacturing facilities, it's of paramount importance that energy and maintenance teams are receiving timely information on their connectivity statuses and availability of their assets to ensure an uninterrupted power supply to their site can be achieved, preventing costly losses of production time. They also need to be sure that the insights that they are driving from their energy management system are based on an accurate and complete picture of their data.

Optimum has a range of out of the box tools to track data quality and asset connectivity including a module dedicated to data quality and completeness, as well as data quality dashboard widgets and a data completeness alerting function to inform users via email when key assets stop sending data to the cloud. 

By keeping users informed of data quality issues and making these issues transparent, Optimum allows users to identify assets that regularly have communication issues, targeting them preferentially for comms upgrades and investigations ensuring continuity of comms. The data quality widgets also provide key details around the connectivity status of the asset as well as the last successfully ingested data point. Monitoring assets with these features allows targeted interventions to reduce comms blackouts and offers the user the flexibility to create their own alerts tailored for their sites.

Asset energy reporting

Many manufacturing customers are extremely high consumers of energy. As such, many of them have their own energy generation equipment on-site to minimise their reliance on the grid and to save money. Whilst having on-site generation is extremely important to these customers, it can mean that energy or site managers have a lot more data to worry about and keep on top of.

We've worked with manufacturers to integrate their on-site generation with Optimum. This allows them to make their data really visible as well as enabling them to benefit from our analysis tools, such as efficiency monitoring via our KPI management feature, monitoring asset utilisation through the use of duration curves and keeping a track of the carbon factor of the electricity that they use on their site.

We have received extremely positive feedback from our customers in the manufacturing sector who have started to embrace Optimum. Individuals across their organisation now save considerable amounts of time gathering and analysing their data and all stakeholders work from the same data, generating a digital twin of the factory.

Production line monitoring

Understanding what energy your site is using is important. What's more important when running a complex manufacturing site is understanding  just where in that vast site your energy is being consumed. Our customer wanted to visualise their energy consumption by production line and within that they wanted to understand what energy was actually used on production cycles and what was used on other operations.

Using Optimum’s flexible on-boarding routes, the customer was able to send data directly from their existing infrastructure without the need to install additional hardware, minimising costs. They now have great insights into energy consumption across production lines and within them. They are working on expanding their use of Optimum beyond energy data and are starting to bring steam, heat and production data into the system to further increase their understanding of their site.

They can now benchmark lines against one another without having to invest considerable time to do so and their ultimate goal is to be able to expand their use of Optimum to be able to inform them what the carbon impact of each item produced is.