MES functionality: energy

Energy has gone from a line on the utilities bill to a board-level conversation. It's a major cost. It's at the heart of sustainability targets. And in most factories, nobody can see it below the site meter.

You know the site used more energy this month. You don't know why.

What energy monitoring in MES/MOM covers

• Consumption by machine and line, from meters or directly from the equipment.
• Consumption by order and product, by linking energy to what was being produced at the time.
• Idle consumption: what machines draw when they're on but not producing.
• Energy per piece or per kilogram, so you can compare products, lines and sites fairly.
• Alerts when consumption moves outside expected limits.

Context is what makes it useful

An energy meter on its own tells you how much was used. That's helpful, but it doesn't tell you what to do.

The value comes when energy is linked to operational context, which is exactly what MES/MOM has. Which order was running. Which product. Which shift. Whether the machine was producing, idle, in changeover or stopped.

Now you can answer useful questions:

• Which products cost the most energy to make, per unit?
• How much do we spend running machines that aren't producing anything?
• Why does Line 3 use 15% more energy per piece than Line 2 for the same product?
• What's our energy cost per order, for pricing and costing?

The usual quick wins

When manufacturers first see energy in context, the same things tend to show up:

• Ovens, compressors and heaters left running between orders or over weekends
• Long warm-up times before the first order of the week
• Compressed air leaks running 24 hours a day
• Older equipment using far more than newer equipment for the same output

None of these need new technology to fix. They need visibility.

Energy and sustainability reporting

Sustainability reporting increasingly needs evidence rather than estimates, and much of that evidence starts on the shopfloor. Energy per product, linked to production data, is the foundation for product-level carbon reporting.

I make the wider case in You can't hit ESG targets without shopfloor data.

Start with the big consumers

You don't need to meter everything. Start with your largest energy users and your bottleneck lines, link them to production data, and look for the obvious waste first. In my experience, the first improvements usually pay for the metering.

This article is part of the MES functionality series.

Do you know which of your products is the most energy-intensive to make?