Energy consumption is one of the major costs of any business, and especially so in industries like metalworking, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Being able to reduce the energy used for compressed air, heating and melting substances will greatly impact the bottom line of companies working in that area.
The vision of our mother company PA Solutions is to ‘engineer a sustainable future through consulting, automation and digitization’. So it’s no surprise that Inimco and PA Solutions have worked out an application that helps drive down energy consumption, not only saving money, but also safeguarding the future of our planet and our children. This application is Facts Energy Management.
Correlating production data and energy data
Facts Energy Management is built on top of Facts the IIoT platform. This platform helps you collect all the data from your equipment. Its connectors to energy meters allows you to directly read the energy consumption from any machine, while the platform can also get additional data from other software solutions such as SAP or any database, for instance the database containing your energy bills. Bringing all your energy data together with your energy consumption gives you the possibility to correlate all this data. Facts Energy Management is very granular: you can analyze consumption data on a company basis, on site level, on floor level, on machine level and even on the level of machine parts. For instance, if you have an extrusion machine, you can measure the energy consumption of the heating unit, the engine and the cooling unit. Facts Energy Management allows you to go as fine-grained as you want – or as you can measure.
Facts Energy Management provides you with a dashboard you can apply your domain knowledge to so you can identify opportunities to reduce your energy consumption. For instance, you can look at the three machines that use most energy. And you may see that these machines are old and could use some maintenance or new gearing to reduce their consumption. Another example: you can compare office spaces to each other. You may find that some buildings need twice the energy or heating per employee than others. At that moment you can start looking at the reasons behind that. This is not something you will get just by staring at your energy bills.
Facts Energy Management helps you comply with ISO standards
Another feature of Facts Energy Management is the ability to identify peaks in energy usage. We all know that peaks cost more and a more balanced energy consumption is cheaper. Facts Energy Management shows you the peaks so you can again apply your domain expertise to smoothen out these peaks by taking specific measures.
For companies that are applying for the ISO 50001 standard or need to renew their accreditation, Facts Energy Management is a great way of both measuring your compliance, actually proving it and documenting it with concrete metrics. Part of the ISO certification is to identify your main energy consumers and that is information that Facts Energy Management easily delivers. For companies that have ESG as part of their annual reporting, Facts Energy Management again provides all the details on how you are improving your energy footprint.
For a list of all features in Facts Energy Management, check out our dedicated webpage.
How to implement Facts Energy Management
We make implementing Facts Energy Management as simple as possible for our customers. PA Solutions is here to help you with an end-to-end approach, assisting you all the way, from defining the measurement concept (what do you want to measure, what results do you want to obtain), through to the physical implementation (for instance installing the meters and connecting them to a central gateway) and finally offering managed services to ensure you are always getting correct measurement so you can continue to improve your energy efficiency. We can also add additional solutions from our sister companies inside the PA Solutions ecosystem, for instance the AI-driven solutions of Yazzoom that can detect anomalies and predict your future energy usage.
The future looks bright
Implementing Facts Energy Management allows you to be compliant, save energy, save costs and reduce your carbon footprint. You can measure anything that you have data on: electricity, heat, compressed air, fuel (for instance if you have your own generators) – and why not measure another precious resource: water. At PA Solutions we are also identifying future use cases such as tracking your entire waste production, especially related to liquids or gas.
Meet us at ABISS in Kortrijk Xpo on October 5th to see how we can help you reduce your energy footprint.