4.0 Knowledge

Production monitoring, the immediate energy-saving solution!

Written by Author | 4/29/24 12:50 PM

Let's face it, we are navigating through a complex and challenging economic context. We are just emerging from an unprecedented health crisis, the environmental crisis is a reality, and international conflicts have a massive impact on energy management and costs. If we add to this the issues of recruitment, rising costs of materials, inflation... We get a too salty cocktail whose effects directly impact the financial health of companies.

 

For industrial companies (as well as others), it becomes vital to find solutions to rationalize expenses, as the hourly costs of production machines are literally skyrocketing 💥!

 

Saving money, saving time to be more efficient is the priority!

 

Yes, but how?

One solution appears obvious and especially very easy to implement: improving performance! Because being more efficient means saving time, thereby saving money, and that's the whole promise of production monitoring!

 

The benefits of production monitoring, reminder!

As we discussed in our previous article, increasing productivity can be summarized as increasing your OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness, the most common performance indicator in the industry). We had given a concrete example:

 

Practical case:

➡️ PLANT K has 20 machines

➡️ The hourly machine rate is €70 (cost of €70 per hour per machine)

➡️ The workshop is open from 6 am to 10 pm (in 2x8), i.e., 16 hours per day

➡️ We account for 2 hours of planned stops per day (team breaks), i.e., a production time slot of 14 hours

 

PLANT K begins its digital transformation and deploys KEYPROD, our plug & play production monitoring solution directly within its workshop:

Over a full year of use, PLANT K's OEE increased by 10% thanks to the information that KEYPROD provided, which allowed it to make strategic decisions to establish corrective/improvement actions.

 

ℹ️ We are not pulling these 10% out of our hat! We record on average a 10% increase in OEE in the first year of using KEYPROD with our clients!

 

With this information, let's do some math together:

 

Number of machines

20

Hourly machine cost

70€

Operating hours per day

14

OEE gain after one year

10%

   

Annual working hours

(Opening Time)

70 840 h

Net annual productive hours gained thanks to the installation of KEYPROD (Project time deducted)

5 050 h

   

Net gain the first year (KEYPROD deducted)

317 500€

 

The figures speak for themselves; nearly a single year of use, and a reasonable increase in OEE of 10%, the results are unequivocal. PLANT K has better monitored its production and was able to access data that allowed it to improve and produce better, in the same production time!

 

Producing the same with less machine time = 7%

The hourly cost of machines includes a value that has experienced a significant increase at the beginning of 2023. The kWh price simply went from €0.1374 in 2022 to €0.35 in 2023!!! That's +154%!

 

But good news! You have chosen to monitor your production to measure and improve your performance, you produce, or will produce, better and in less time: THEREFORE YOU CONSUME LESS ENERGY!

 

Let's go back to our example above:

 

kWh cost: €0.35 Net annual productive hours gained thanks to the installation of KEYPROD (Project time deducted): 5,050 hours

Net gain the first year (included in the machine hourly cost): €17,675

That's a reduction in your energy bill of 7%

 

kWh cost

0,35€

Net annual productive hours gained thanks to the installation of KEYPROD (Project time deducted)

5 050 h

   

Net gain the first year (included in the machine hourly cost)

17 675€

That's a reduction in your energy bill of

7%

 

7%! That's a clear figure on the implicit gain of a digitization strategy of production! Doing better, or even as usual, but by saving time and energy!

 

There are other, less quantifiable externalities

And it is our clients who speak about it best. Several of them have testified to the positive impact that the democratization of KEYPROD has created for them:

 

"Since the installation of KEYPROD in our workshop, we have significantly reduced our paper consumption. This has allowed us, on the one hand, to reduce our expenses in terms of purchasing reams (about - 5,000 A4 sheets per year), but mainly to eliminate unnecessary travel to manage printing, which corresponds to about 100 hours saved annually for our site given its size.

The KEYPROD interface has allowed us to stop using Excel spreadsheets to compile our end-of-day loss pareto. For the part of the site installed to date, we estimate having saved 400 hours over a year, without doing anything more than installing the solution"

Source - Production System Manager - French Industrial SME in the automotive sector

 

Also, investing in digital means continuously renewing one's economic model, image, and dynamics. The digital transformation of an organization allows, on the one hand, to differentiate oneself, but essentially to increase its responsiveness and speed. Data exploitation becomes a must, and industrialists have a tremendous amount of it, might as well put it to use to:

 

➡️ Promote communication and information transmission within the company.

➡️ Stimulate innovation, initiative-taking, and awareness

➡️ Develop new skills and optimize digital skills

➡️ Improve the company's image

➡️ Use the time saved to win new markets

➡️ Eliminate non-value-added tasks to further increase productivity!

 

 

Implementing a production monitoring solution like KEYPROD means achieving a 10% increase in OEE and therefore a 7% saving on your energy bill from the first year!

 

In short, it's about acting, so shall we act together?

 

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