The manufacturing industry accounts for much of the world’s energy consumption. In 2021, manufacturing accounted for a whopping 33% of all energy consumption in the U.S. Energy Information and Administration. In Norway, industry uses almost twice as much energy as private individuals annually*. By taking steps to reduce energy consumption, manufacturing companies can make a major impact on total consumption in the world.

* Based on calculation with average figures (2022) from Statistics Norway.

Many manufacturing companies have already adopted sustainability strategies to reduce consumption and emissions, and more and more are trying to get started. With the ongoing energy crisis and rising energy costs, many manufacturing companies are dependent on reducing their energy consumption to remain competitive – or even survive. In addition, the industry faces stricter regulations and regulatory requirements related to sustainability, as well as more environmentally conscious consumers. The time to start producing more sustainably is now.

Use digital tools to implement sustainability strategies on the site floor

Although many manufacturing companies already have sustainability strategies in place, the practical challenge is implementing the strategy on the plant floor. In order to produce more sustainably, it is crucial that production personnel have access to information on a daily basis. Only with insight into energy and raw material consumption can measures be taken to optimise production.

To solve this, you should use digital tools, which give operators and other personnel the information they need, while constantly working on the production process. Access to both real-time and historical data makes it possible to make both immediate and long-term improvements in production related to energy and raw material consumption, faulty manufacturing, traceability and more.

3 steps to reduce energy consumption

How can digital tools be used in practice? Below we share 3 steps on how you can map and optimize energy consumption in the production process.

Step 1: Map – “Are we using too much energy?”

See your spend compared to your normal spending, goals or budgeted spend in real time.

• Monitor consumption related to process areas and production lines
• Record events in production
• Record shifts, time of day and weather conditions
• Compare performance across plants, products, and manufacturing teams
• See consumption compared to sustainability KPIs (e.g. production carbon emissions)

Step 2: Explain – “Why are we using extra energy?”

Leverage context from the site floor to understand how to improve resource efficiency.

• Map the resource consumption of all products
• Find inefficient equipment
• Discover unknown patterns, wrecks or opportunities for improvement
• Contextualize data to manage sustainability KPIs
• Use best practice to standardize operations

Step 3: Optimize – “How can we reduce energy consumption and costs?”

Take actions that improve operational performance and sustainability, both at the process level and throughout the plant.

• Optimize production planning for better utilization of resources
• Reduce resource consumption and associated costs
• Reduce variations in production processes
• Make your supply chain more agile and resilient
• Ensure holistic optimization of the entire production environment

Sustainable production with Proficy Smart Factory

GE Digital’s Proficy Smart Factory software comes with all the features you need to gain insight into the manufacturing process and take action for a more sustainable production. Already using a MES solution from GE Digital? Then you have all the tools you need at your fingertips!

Via the Web-based dashboard platform Proficy Operations Hub, you can access visualized data anywhere, anytime. Below you can see tutorials of six widgets that can be used to gain insight into the energy and raw material consumption of the production process.

Proficy Operations Hub widgets

Sparkline

Displays time series data. Can be used in several areas:

• See energy or water consumption over a period of time
• Correlate energy or water consumption to temperatures/precipitation/weather conditions over a period of time

Watch the Sparkline widget tutorial

Bullet Graph

Displays target value and real value.

• See your energy consumption compared to normal consumption, budgeted consumption or goals

See Bullet Graph widget tutorial

Bar Gauge, Circular Gauge and Solid Gauge

Three widgets with different visualization of value compared to bucket.

• See your energy consumption compared to normal consumption, budgeted consumption or goals

View the Bar Gauge widget tutorial

See Circular Gauge widget tutorial

Watch Solid Gauge widget tutorial

Pie Chart

Displays data values in pie or doughnut chart. Can be used in several areas:

• Illustrate how consumption of e.g. energy and water affects total costs and greenhouse gas emissions
• Show most energy-intensive processes
• View material consumption

Watch the Pie Chart widget tutorial

Join us in reversing the trend

According to Statista, it is expected that energy consumption in industry will continue to increase in the coming years. This is despite an increased focus on sustainability and several challenges for the manufacturing industry, including increased energy costs and stricter regulations and regulatory requirements.

With the right tools in place, you can make a difference – both for the environment and your own business. Do you want to help reverse the trend and work for a more sustainable industry? We’ll help you get started!

Ask us about Smart Factory and sustainability

If you’ve walked through factories and seen operator or supervisor screens like the one below, you’re actually seeing both the best and worst aspects of technology evolution! Clearly, no data is left hidden within the machine or process, but screen design looks to have been driven by the abililty to visualiase what’s available from the underlying controls, rather than a more nuanced view of how to support different people in their work. you could say that the adoption of modern design approaches to building a “good” HMI or SCADA application has lagged what the underlying tools can support.

In Proficy iFIX, GE Digital has incorporated a mix of development acceleration and design philosophies that can both lead to more effective user experiences with a deployed system, while also making the overall cost of building, maintaining, and adapting a SCADA lower.

Three critical elemetns stand out:

1. Model-centric design

This brings object-oriented developement principles to SCADA and related applications. With a “home” for standrad definitions of common assets, and their related descriptibe and attribute data, OT teams can create reusable application components that are quick to deploy for each physical instance of a type. The model also provides useful application foundations, so things like animations, alarm filters and so on can be defined as appropriate for a class or type – and thereofore easily rolled out into the screens where instances of each type are present. And with developments in the GE site making the model infrastructure available to Historain, analytics and MED solutions, work done once can defray the cost and effort needed in related programs.

Taking advantage of what current-generation iFIX offers will mean a different development approach – considering useful asset and object model structure, then templating the way objects should be deployed is a new starting point for many. But with that groundwork laid, the speed to a final solution is in many (most!) cases, faster than older methodologies – and that’s beofer considering the advantage of resuability across asset types, or across multiple servers for different lines or sites.

Recovered time buys room for other changes

With rich automation data mapped to the model, and faster methods to build and roll out screen, different users can have their views tailored to suit their regualr work. Our earlier screen example reflected a common belief that screen design is time-consuming, so best to put as much data as possible in one place so that operators, technicicans, maintenance and even improvement teams can all get what they need without excessive development effort. But that can mean a confused mashup of items that get in the way of managing the core process, and in turn actually hamper investigations when things are going wrong.

But where development time is less of a constraint, more streamlined views can be deployed to support core work processes, with increasing levels of detail exposed on other screen for more technical investigation or troubleshooting. Even without fully adopting GE Digital’s Efficient HMI design guidelines, firms can expect faster and more effective responses form operators and supervisors who don’t have to sift through complex, overloaded views simplu to maintain steady-state operators.

With significant gains to be had in terms of operator responsiveness, and effective management of expectations, the user experience itself can merit as much consideration as the under-the-bonent changes that benefit developers.

Greenfield vs. Brownfield

It may seem like adopting a model-based approach, and taking first steps with the new development environments would be easier on fresh new project, whereas an upgrade scenario should be addressed by “simply” porting forward old screens, the database, etc. But when you consider all that can be involved in that forward migration, the mix of things that need “just a few tweaks” can mean as much – or more – work than a fresh build of the system, where the old serves as a point of reference for design and user requirements.

The proess database is usually the easiest part of the configuration to migrate forward. Even if changing from legacy drivers to IGS or Kepware, these tend to be pretty quick. Most of the tradeoffs of time/budget for an overall better solution are related to screen (and related scripting) upgrades. From many (many!) upgrades we’ve observed our customers make, we see common areas where a “modernisation” rather than a migration can actully be more cost effective, as well as leaving users with a more satisfying solution.

Questions to consider include:

While there is often concen about whether modernisation can be “too much” change, it’s equally true that operators genuinely want to support their compaines in getting better. So if what they see at the end of an investment looks and feels the same way it always has, the chance to enable improvements may have been lost – and with it a chance to engage and energise employees who want to be a part of making things better.

Old vs. New

iFIX 2023 and the broader Proficy suite incorporating more modern tools, which in turn offer choices about methods and approahces. Beyond the technical enablement, enginerring and IT teams may find that exploring these ideas may offer benefit in areas as straightforward as modernising system to avoid obsolescene risk to making tangile progress on IoT and borader digital initiatives.