When the recession hit the automotive industry a few years ago, an Ontario based  supplier of highly engineered sintered metal parts used in automotive power trains faced a  major challenge. They had to cut back to a five day production week, but didn’t know the most efficient way to operate their furnaces. Should they be shutdown completely over the weekend or idle at full or setback temperature? The natural gas fired furnaces were difficult to restart and bring back up to operating temperature, would the gas savings justify the extra work?

While equipment manufacturers are great at designing equipment, they have little experience with operating machinery under production conditions, and they almost never address energy efficiency so there were no written procedures available.

Utility consumption reports were of little use, they weren’t current and only monitored the mainline coming into the plant. Trying to manage energy with historical consumption reports is like driving a car by only looking in the rear-view mirror – you know where you’ve been, but have no way of planning ahead. As the Operations Manager said, “when we made operating changes, the impact was lost in the whole scope of the factory”.

The solution was to install an Energy Monitoring and Targeting system, also known as EM&T, M&T or EMIS, Energy Management Information System. The M&T system provided vastly improved insight into the operation of the equipment. First, by adding sub-meters to each line, managers were able to view energy use in real time through their web-browsers, giving operators and managers immediate feedback on changes to the line.

Next, energy models were developed by identifying the key drivers that affected each line, such as throughput rates, temperature settings and even the outside weather. By comparing energy use against the models in real time, managers were able to see the effects of changes to the line, and how they varied against the model. They could develop “what-if” scenarios of different operating and shut-down procedures to optimize energy performance.

The end result? By optimizing their operating and shutdown procedures, the company reduced energy costs by $240,000 per year, without any additional capital expenditures. They also found that one of their two “identical” furnaces actually used 10% less gas than the other, which became a key factor in planning production.

With the M&T system in place, the Operations Manager said “we have precise information on how much energy we’re using in different parts of our processes and we can see changes instantly – both positive and negative. And anybody can use it. For instance, the people in charge of the furnaces can check for themselves. It gets the information to the people who need it – those running vital operations.”

To find out how Energy Monitoring and Targeting can help you reduce costs and develop a long-term energy management plan, contact us at sales@SmartSystemInnovations.com.