Reducing the carbon footprint and improving sustainability is no longer a negotiable option in today’s world, according to the targets for carbon neutrality established by the European Union. Energy efficiency is the key factor. And technological advances are decisive in making it happen.
In this article we’re going to take a closer look on how to apply optimised energy management in industry with support from software based on IIoT technologies.
Contents
- IIoT geared towards energy efficiency: The quest for sustainability in industry 4.0
- Industrial Maturity Model in Energy Management
- Aritex Code, your ally in reducing energy consumption
- Sustainable energy management with Thingworx and Kepware
IIoT geared towards energy efficiency: The quest for sustainability in industry 4.0
In previous articles we took an in-depth look at the benefits of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for industry: we described its operational advantages and its impact on your bottom line by focussing on two key parameters: reduced operational costs and increased efficiency.
This time round we’d like to show you how device interconnection and data analysis – key features in the IIoT – contribute towards increased energy efficiency in today’s industries. And that means cost reductions and increased sustainability.
If you want to know more about the tools that Aritex Code integrates into industrial digital transformation projects to optimise energy efficiency, we’ll tell you more about the utilities associated with the Thingworx and Kepware IIoT platforms, developed by PTC.
But if you’re more interested in finding out what phase of the Industrial Maturity Model in Energy Management your company is in, then read on.
Model of Industrial Maturity in Energy Management
Having a well-defined starting point is essential when you’re planning objectives. The Model of Industrial Maturity in Energy Management can help you to define a company’s current situation in this area and set real objectives.
Phases of the Industrial Maturity Model in Energy Management
Off
- The company has no energy management strategy.
- Limited infrastructure for acquiring energy visibility throughout the plant.
- Isolated data sources, which lead to manual processes for tracking and reporting on energy use and costs.
- No baselines or reference points have been established to monitor progress.
On
- Corporate energy management strategies are well defined.
- Utilities that use scalable IIoT platforms are applied to analyse energy use.
- Energy management report panels with descriptive analyses.
- KPIs are defined in every process.
- Transparent energy consumption and emissions reports are available.
Smart
- Ambitious targets are set with clearly defined routes towards them.
- There is a central panel that gathers information from all the facilities to streamline energy management.
- Predictive and prescriptive analyses to optimise energy efficiency.
- Advanced production programming to improve profitability.
- Effective OCM implemented to ensure successive adoption of advanced skills in the organisation.
- Potential for obtaining immediate business impact thanks to energy management.
World class
- Leads the way towards carbon neutrality and its best practices become standards for the industry.
- Implements cutting-edge holistic and technological strategies to achieve value throughout the supply chain and reduce costs.
- Makes use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to autonomously improve energy efficiency.
- Uses advanced algorithms to forecast and optimise electric vehicle fleet operations.
- Integrates energy supply systems from a range of sources (distributed/renewable) to achieve major financial benefits.
- Innovates to discover, design, develop and offer better and more sustainable products.
If your company is in the ‘Smart’ or ‘World Class’ phases, well done! It’s more likely that it’s somewhere between ‘Off’ and ‘On’.
But don’t worry, improving energy management, making the shift to efficiency and reducing contaminating emissions is much simpler than you think!
Aritex Code, your ally in reducing energy consumption
Aritex Code’s experience in digital transformation and energy efficiency projects enables us to find points for improvement with a very fast return on investment.
We offer a different focus from the word go: instead of applying a reactive approach to optimise energy consumption (as most companies do), we implement a comprehensive energy management solution that puts energy compliance centre stage in your strategies.
That way we go beyond reducing energy consumption and focus on optimising processes that not only consume more energy but also involve greater (and more inefficient) effort for your workforce.
After all, efficiency not only consists of reducing the energy bill by improving infrastructures, inefficient activity patterns also need to be changed.
And to do all that we have the PTC Thingworx IIoT platform. But before we explain how this tool can help you improve energy management, let’s see some success stories.
Examples of Energy Management Solutions
GE Healthcare Global Services
8,000 engineers responsible for servicing high technology medical equipment in 140 countries. The difficulties they faced in remote problem diagnosis and resolution posed major challenges for their highly important work.
Thanks to the solutions we proposed, not only has their energy management improved, they’ve also managed to reduce costs and improve their service:
- The start up of a remote backup centre based on IIoT led to a 25% reduction in travel times for engineers working on site.
- New self-service portals led to a 40% reduction in the volume of calls to the call centre.
- And both solutions brought about an average reduction of 30% in working time to resolve an incident.
Tofaş (Turkish automobile manufacturer)
Tofaş is a company in the automobile sector that exports to 80 countries worldwide and is one of the largest industrial corporations in Turkey, with more than 7,000 employees. It has a direct relationship with the Fiat Group and is a supplier for large automobile companies worldwide.
Tofaş realised that it needed to undergo a major digital transformation if it wanted to consolidate its position. And it made use of the PTC Kepware and Thingworx IIoT platforms.
Since implementation commenced in 2020, it has:
- Reduced maintenance costs by 15% with the help of predictive maintenance applications.
- Reduced energy consumption by 7% thanks to optimisation and analysis projects.
- Increased general equipment efficiency (OEE) by 12%.
- Generated 23% less scrap.
- Reduced safety incidents by 60%.
Sustainable Energy Management with Thingworx and Kepware
The combination of Kepware and Thingworx make up the IIoT platform that gathers information in real time from all the OT source (operation technologies: sensors, actuators, controllers, PLC, SCADA, etc.) and interconnects industrial and business software (from MES to ERP).
The software is based on the IIoT, includes elements of AI and machine learning and can be adapted to the needs of any industry 3.0 to convert it into a smart factory.
What’s more, Thingworx includes specific utilities geared towards optimising energy management:
- Control panel and energy management.
- Energy optimisation through automated ROI analysis and monitoring.
- Sustainability and monitoring of the CO2 footprint.
The help provided by the PTC Thingworx and Kepware IIoT platforms enables us to forecast energy needs, carry out real time monitoring of consumption and the KPIs, and run comparisons of energy performance, and so achieve savings in energy costs of up to 10-15%.
With the right vision and adequate configuration, Thingworx puts the analyses to guide your company to efficient energy management in the palm of your hand.
