This food and beverage group currently has 35 manufacturing plants across China, all of which were previously managed manually. Each morning, a designated staff member would record energy consumption data and then manually enter it into an Excel spreadsheet. After the MES system calculated the production volume, they would then estimate the energy usage and cost
Li Jin, Business Development Manager at Advantech , highlighted that manual data collection is time-consuming and labor-intensive, causing several limitations in the group's energy consumption management. First, there is a lack of timeliness, as daily reports take hours of cross-departmental effort to compile. Second, energy consumption can only be managed at the individual plant level, making it difficult to perform horizontal and vertical comparisons across the group's 35 plants. Third, detailed energy cost control is challenging due to the presence of multiple meters in production workshops or on production lines, making it difficult to accurately distinguish the energy consumption of each line or piece of equipment. Therefore, energy cost calculations rely on existing rules and cannot be precisely allocated to individual orders or products.
Now, these issues are being resolved through Advantech iEMS's various I.Apps. Among them, the WISE-IoT facility management system automatically gathers relevant data on equipment operating status and energy consumption. The IoTSuite, an IoT platform, connects key equipment and meter data in the factory to the cloud for unified management. ECOWatch, the energy management system, uses built-in formulas to perform calculations and analysis, comparing categories such as products, production lines, departments, and plants. The results are displayed in visual charts, helping administrators better understand energy consumption and develop more effective energy management policies.。
