Save energy and money and save the planet

How does your company manage its energy consumption? Is the bill coming in, noting that it is getting higher and higher but not doing anything else about it? Then it might be time to look further. Because Inimco's IIoT solution Facts Energy Management gives you all the tools you need to capture your energy consumption, analyse it and then take the right actions to make your operations more sustainable and reduce your energy bill. You immediately have all the data you need to comply with CRSD reporting and you also help save the planet. 

One of the biggest costs for all manufacturing companies today? Energy consumption, especially in energy-intensive industries such as steel, chemicals and pharma. Those who manage to reduce their energy consumption for compressed air and the heating and melting of materials will have a much better grip on their costs. A mission to which Inimco is happy to contribute. In this, it shares the vision of parent company PA Solutions to engineer a sustainable future through consulting, automation and digitalisation. So it should come as no surprise that they teamed up with Facts Energy Management to develop an application that reduces energy consumption. 

Bringing together energy data

How does that work? Facts Energy Management is built on top of the Facts IIoT platform. This platform already helps you to get all the data from your installations. Using connectors to energy meters, Facts Energy Management can also read the energy consumption of your machine directly. It also looks for additional data from other software solutions, such as the ERP package that contains your energy invoices. By putting all the energy data alongside your energy consumption, you get the opportunity to start correlating all the data. Facts Energy Management is very granular: you can make the analysis at the level of the company, but also dig deeper and deeper to the level of each machine and even the parts of that machine. If you have an extrusion machine, for example, you can measure the energy consumption of both the motor and the cooling unit. You can go as detailed as you want or how deep you can measure.

Customised dashboards

Facts energy Management visualises all this information for you in dashboards. You can use your own knowledge of your processes to discover opportunities to reduce your energy consumption. For example, you can look at the three machines that consume the most energy. The data will tell you that they already have some years on the clock and could reduce their consumption with a thorough maintenance or new gears. Another example: you compare production sites. Some lines need twice as much electricity or heating per employee as others. So you no longer just look at the figures, but start to see the connections behind them. You cannot possibly get these valuable insights from your energy bills alone.

Detecting peaks

But you can do so much more with Facts Energy Management. For example, another interesting feature is the ability to detect peaks in energy consumption. We all know that these cost more than a constant load on the grid. Identifying the peaks is the first step towards targeted measures to smooth them out. Companies seeking certification to ISO 50001, Facts Energy Management offers an excellent way to both measure and prove your compliance and document it with concrete metrics. A component within this ISO standardisation is identifying your main energy guzzlers, information that Facts Energy Management provides particularly easily. Also for companies that want to report annually on ESG, Facts Energy Management provides all the details on how to improve your energy footprint.

Foundation for improving energy efficiency

In summary, Facts Energy Management ensures that you meet standards, save energy and costs, and reduce your carbon footprint. You can measure everything you have data on: electricity, heat, compressed air, fuels and why not that other precious resource, water? What's more, you're not alone. Inimco and PA Solutions support you all along the way. From defining the measurement concept - what do you want to measure, what do you want to do with that information - over the physical implementation, with the installation of the meters and the connection to a central gateway, to the managed services, so that you always get the right measurement values to improve your energy efficiency.

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Next step: digital twin for sustainable energy management
The Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) awarded a project grant to IoT specialist Inimco. The ‘Factory Digital Twin for Energy Manager’ project links production data to energy data and is an extension of the existing Inimco.Facts Energy Management product. “Traditionally, all data is collected and calculated afterwards,” says co-founder Erik De Nert. “By using digital twins and data modelling, this calculation can be done at all times and in real-time.” The innovative nature of this R&D project lies in the standardisation of data types on energy consumption and their smart combination with product information. The insights that manufacturing companies will gain from Factory Digital Twin for Energy Manager will allow them to prove compliance with all regulations and conditions from tenders.