Practical energy savings: How can the Energy Tracker module cut your consumption and costs?
In our last article, we covered the key benefits and general uses of the Energy Tracker module. Now it's time to get practical. Let’s take a look at a few real-life challenges our customers face – and how the latest addition to the MES SoftLi family helps solve them.
Energy Tracker module in the plastics industry
In plastics manufacturing, molding machines need to preheat before they can begin processing materials. But this preheating consumes a significant amount of energy.
Often, however, machines remain switched on even when they’re temporarily out of operation – waiting to resume production.
Sometimes it's due to a breakdown, other times it's a lack of operators or the order on hold.
Whatever the reason, the outcome always stays the same: it costs money.
Yes, some employees at our client’s facility are able to recognize unnecessary preheating by touch and will manually turn off the machine.
But after a digital transformation, relying on intuition is no longer necessary.
The customer knows that if downtime lasts more than two hours, keeping the machine heated just doesn’t pay off.
Therefore, he wanted to automate this process so that he would receive an alert via the Alarms module if production had not been running on the machines for 120 minutes, but they were still consuming large amounts of energy.
With MES SoftLi’s full integration, he can easily decide whether to keep the preheating on before the next production.
He simply checks the Planner (production scheduler) to see when the next job is scheduled. If it’s in 3 or 4 hours, he knows he can turn off the preheating without worry.
Energy Tracker module in the rubber industry
In the rubber industry, wasting energy is an even more painful topic, because heating rubber takes longer and requires higher temperatures.
In addition, machines produce a lot of scrap before they are fine-tuned and reach optimal production performance.
Thus, tracking time and energy usage is crucial.
That’s why we designed the Energy Tracker module to allow you to easily monitor electricity consumption and its impact on quality.
This client can now, thanks to the integration with production data, easily determine that during the preheating phase, the machine only starts producing good parts after consuming a certain amount of energy.
They’ll know exactly how much time to let the machines preheat, saving on energy costs and material that would otherwise turn into waste.
With the current cost of energy, every minute counts, making the fact that you were preheating machines 15 minutes longer than required in the past worth its weight in gold.
Energy Tracker module in real production
It's not just the case of our DEMO that... seeing is believing!
So, in the final practical example, we will show you what the Energy Tracker module looks like in action on a real production line and how you can interpret the data it collects.
Due to a pressure drop in the compressor, it was switched on, which temporarily increased the device's energy consumption.
From 16:00 to 16:10, the machine experienced a short downtime without being switched off, causing consumption to drop but not to zero.
The device was turned off from 18:00 to 18:30, halting production and ensuring no energy was wasted, with consumption dropping to zero.
Measuring electricity is just the beginning
The Energy Tracker module is designed to communicate with devices that measure energy. This includes electricity, gas, water, and even compressed air – one of the priciest energy forms in industry, prone to leaks.
If you'd like to measure and link other energy types to production data, get in touch. We can definitely come up with a solution for your needs.
Are you ready to cut down on energy waste?
Get in touch for a free demo of the MES SoftLi Energy Tracker. We'll show you how it can optimize your production and help you save both energy and money.
