The objective of any factory or production firm is to improve profitability and reduce operational costs while boosting the overall production rate. Moreover, these facilities also have to maintain the optimum quality of the products they manufacture while sufficing the demand of their customers.
Manual processes and legacy operations have stretched as much as possible to achieve these goals and hence it is now high-time to identify and install techniques that can push the limits of these industries even further.
Executing the capabilities of IIoT based energy monitoring solution can be the initial step for these companies to boost their efficiency and reduce lead time. By harnessing energy consumption data, a company gains the ability to make smarter decisions to accomplish these objectives and achieve operational excellence.
What is Energy Monitoring?
Energy monitoring refers to the process of tracking and supervising the amount of energy consumed in a particular time interval. IoT sensors and systems embedded on different assets, equipment, and machines can collect consumption data and share it with a centralized platform. Based on the size of the system, the consumption data can be tracked for a particular machine, process, or even an entire production line.
By analyzing and processing the real-time collected data, operators and managers attain a better position to make intelligent decisions. They can improve efficiency across the board, reduce machine downtime, and impede probable malfunctions through proactive measures.
These wireless energy monitoring systems are engulfed with all the capabilities of collecting, ingesting, analyzing, and managing data; that makes them a perfect end to end comprehensive solution for industrial implementation. At a minimum investment of 2,000 to 2,500 USD, a company can gain the ability to monitor its whole cradle to grave operations.
Why is Industrial IoT solutions a better choice for Energy Monitoring?
Before the 3rd industrial revolution, there wasn’t much means for companies to identify the amount of energy consumed or track the performance of their equipment. They had to rely on their workforce for inspection operations and identify loopholes that result in subsequent losses in terms of malfunctions and breakdowns. These manual intervention tasks often resulted in unwanted downtime and overhead costs.
The advent of industries 3.0, brought in the use of computerization techniques that offered some degree of monitoring capabilities. SCADA systems and PLCs were developed too to offer some benefit in terms of condition monitoring and status identification. However, the inability to present real-time information and manage historical data limits the applications that industries really need.
By using the technology of the Internet of Things, factories and workshops can now monitor their real-time energy consumption and use historical data to develop patterns and trends related to its utilization. Moreover, companies can also facilitate an M2M interconnection to prevent their machines from working in standalone conditions and infuse automation in their production lines.
The solutions of Industrial IoT is, therefore, the best choice for industries for energy monitoring. Let us look at some of the benefits a facility can leverage from the use of IIoT energy monitoring solution:
1) Equipment Availability Monitoring:
Monitoring the availability or uptime-downtime condition of the machine is an important aspect of any industrial setup. Downtime results in lowering employee productivity, wastage of resources, and unwanted overheads. Moreover, it results in a decrease in production rate that affects the revenue gaining opportunities for a company.
By using energy monitoring systems, a facility can at all-times track the availability of their machines and assets. They can see when their machines were in standby mode and due to what reason. Hence, they can optimize their on-floor activities and improve their operations to reduce downtime.
2) Machine Health Monitoring:
Monitoring and maintaining machines require scheduled inspection where operators closely follow a series of pre-determined guidelines to examine the functioning of their equipment. Subsequently, they can conduct necessary repairs and overhauls to increase the effectiveness of their equipment.
However, these scheduling tasks requires machines to be kept in standby condition that results in unwanted downtime. By using energy monitoring systems, companies can leverage the benefits of real-time alerts to identify components of machines that are going to fail. Thus, they won’t need to rely on their scheduled procedures to identify possibilities of component breakdowns or machine malfunctions.
3) Facilities Efficiency Improvement:
Plant Efficiency is an important factor that demonstrates the competence and proficiency of a factory. It constitutes all the processes of a typical industrial setup such as the availability of its machine, utilization of available resources, and its consumption practices.
Improving the efficiency of the plant is hence an important goal of any company. With the help of IoT based energy monitoring solutions, companies can collect data pertaining to the consumption of energy by their assets and successively the plant. By processing and analyzing this data, companies can hence detect loopholes and bottlenecks that restrain the efficiency of the company. Hence, they will be able to take proactive measures to boost the efficiency of their plant or workshop.
CONCLUSION:
Energy monitoring systems are in huge demand right now. However, an end to end energy monitoring that can cater to the modern needs of companies is missing in the market.
Biz4Intellia’s black-box IoT solution offer energy monitoring capabilities that a company can leverage to keep their machines in a tip-top condition, optimize the utilization of their resources, and improve the efficiency of their entire facility. So what are you waiting for? Request a quote now to implement an energy monitoring solution in your company.
