Viewpoint: the key to increased efficiency through analytics

The challenges currently facing UK manufacturers have never been greater, with increasing price pressure, rising production energy costs and constantly changing regulations all having an impact.

Each of these issues directly affects operational expenditure, leaving both margin and profit at risk. Under pressure to ensure the end price for the consumer remains competitive, the only logical course of action is for manufacturers to safeguard margins by lowering operational costs through eliminating inefficiencies.

One area where they can make these savings is in their energy spend. Having an effective energy management strategy has become a necessity and unlocking the hidden value of big data holds the key to implementing it correctly.

An average manufacturing site can generate millions of data points daily and may require this data to be stored for several years. So, how can the potential of Big Data be realised and made to work to improve energy management?

Having an effective energy management strategy has become a necessity and unlocking the hidden value of big data holds the key to implementing it correctly

Energy consumption can be reduced by improving the monitoring and control of energy used in infrastructure. For many, the prospect of a complete infrastructure upgrade is impractical but, through the implementation of corporate energy management solutions, businesses can develop a better understanding of their operations, and visualise their energy use in order to quickly identify inefficiencies.

Recently, a beverage manufacturer wanted to improve the way it monitored its energy usage. Smart metering allowed the company to track consumption, but the data was stored in an isolated database and only reviewed sporadically, and was therefore only of limited use.

As part of a pilot scheme, the company implemented an operational intelligence (OI) product that creates an information framework to simultaneously connect to industrial data sources and automate the calculation, contextualisation and storage of operational key performance indicator (KPI) metrics.

This enabled the manufacturer to access real-time management dashboards, allowing them to monitor energy consumption in the context of each site, line and operator.

This then allowed them to isolate previously unidentified spikes in consumption and immediately take action to resolve them. The next step for the industry will see data from various manufacturing systems being aggregated together.

This can then be manipulated and analysed using browser-based technologies, allowing those running businesses to see energy usage across the production process and how that data tracks back to the bottom line.

With greater access to data on batch and quality management, manufacturers can ensure that productivity remains high, performance abnormalities are spotted instantly, and unscheduled downtime is prevented

Operational intelligence can also deliver insight into other areas of the manufacturing process, providing further cut-through for other efficiencies beyond energy usage.

With greater access to data on batch and quality management, manufacturers can ensure that productivity remains high, performance abnormalities are spotted instantly, and unscheduled downtime is prevented.

Deriving intelligence from the analysis of data is vital for any organisation. This is especially true for manufacturers, who not only face a fight for survival from external challenges and competitors, but can often be up against other locations and plants within the same company which enjoy lower cost bases.

The easy availability and analysis of data can transform the way a company works and enable businesses to better understand their plant, and predict and manage performance and expenditure.

With so much of this data already available and locked in process data historians, accessing it is easier than you think.

• Andy Graham is Wonderware UK product manager at SolutionsPT