Case Study: Energy Monitoring Solution for a Glass Manufacturer

Client Overview

The client is among the biggest glass manufacturing companies with factories in Dubai and Mumbai that serve the best industries in construction, automotive, and consumer goods. The energy-intensive nature of their manufacturing process, which involves stages such as lamination, washer, heat soak, compressor, cutting, and finishing, presented challenges.

With increasing energy prices and more emphasis on sustainability, the client sought an advanced energy monitoring system to optimize the use of their energy supply while improving transparency in regard to cost.

Challenges

Some of the major challenges that the client faced and impacted their operations and profitability were:

1. High Energy Consumption: Their high-energy consumption was gobbled away into a major chunk of their cost of operations. However, they had no way of monitoring or analyzing the energy consumption per machine or lot of production, losing track of where they were losing efficiency.
2. Low Cost Visibility: The customer could not trace the exact energy costs to specific products or batches. This meant that the customer was underpricing some products, thereby cutting into the profit margins.
3. Operational Inefficiencies: Machine performance was very variable on the production line, and some machines used disproportionately more energy. Identification of the underperforming machines was not systematic but rather sporadic.
4. Sustainability Goals: Improving internal and regulatory targets for sustainability demanded greater transparency into energy consumption patterns and carbon emissions. The absence of actionable data meant slow progress toward these goals.

Solution

We designed and implemented the complete IIoT-based Energy Monitoring Solution for the client with these challenges.

1.Hardware Deployment

We started implementing the latest hardware to measure the energy data:

• Deployed current transformers and energy meters for those specific high-importance machinery through the manufacturing plant.
• IoT Gateways will be integrated for real-time collections from the meters and upload the data securely to the cloud.

2. Integration of Data

The above solution included integrating energy data with production data seamlessly.

• The above solution included integrating energy data with production data seamlessly
• Collected energy consumption metrics and batch-specific production data, for instance, glass thickness and batch duration on a centralized IoT portal.
• Developed APIs that integrated data on energy and production such that it could be used for full analysis.

3. Custom Reports and Dashboards

There are some other key features of our provided solution, which were the development of reports and dashboards. They are given below

• Batch-wise Energy Reports: Provided information for energy consumption of each and every production batch, like that of glass thickness being 6 mm or 8 mm.