By harnessing the value of data through analytics, statistical analysis and machine learning, there is enormous potential for small and medium sized enterprises in the manufacturing industry to boost their productivity and competitiveness.

The Smart Manufacturing Data Hub (SMDH) is a platform for manufacturers to easily upload data extracted from systems and sensors in their factories and receive unique insights through applications developed by a team of expert data scientists.

Understanding operational inefficiencies through the sharing of energy data is now more important than ever, with energy prices reaching record highs in recent years. Energy Systems Catapult has built solutions that provide improved data analytics tailored to manufacturing companies interested in better understanding and managing their energy use.

The challenge

The increasing cost of energy represents a risk to manufacturers’ profitability. Additionally, the need to report emissions in some energy intensive manufacturing sectors or to satisfy customer or supply chain requirements, have changed the strategic importance of energy for manufacturing SMEs.

The first steps to reduce energy costs involve cutting down on consumption where it is not needed, but to do this, a digital infrastructure is needed to visualise where and when excess energy is being used.

The role Energy Systems Catapult plays in the SMDH is to identify solutions that:

•         Empower manufacturing employees to act in reducing wasteful energy consumption and increasing energy efficiency.
•         Encourage the sharing of anonymised data for benchmarking energy consumption across the manufacturing sector.
•         Assist companies on their journey towards Net Zero.
•         Increase uptake of digital infrastructure by showing the benefits data analysis can bring.

The solution

By visualising energy data in an easy to understand, accessible way, employees in the manufacturing industry can feel empowered to take action to reduce energy waste, saving on energy costs.

To support this, the Catapult data science team have developed manufacturing energy analytics dashboards that connect to energy data uploaded to the SMDH.

The dashboards visualise the following:

• ‘The Energy Insights Dashboard’ gives a breakdown of energy used over time and how it relates to productivity by:
  • Evaluating the amount of energy used outside of working hours
  • Estimating the amount of energy used for regular background operations
  • Identifying abnormally high energy loads, allowing for investigation and efficiency improvements.

The Energy Insights Dashboard helps manufacturers identify opportunities to reduce energy use. Where appropriate, the SMDH team can further support small and medium sized enterprises by installing machine-level power monitoring sensors. These can provide additional insight into the utilisation and energy consumption of energy-intensive processes within the factory.

• The ‘Energy Impact Tracker’ provides manufacturers with information about their CO2 emissions from gas and electricity consumption. Using data from the National Grid Carbon Intensity database, the dashboard accurately calculates the emissions from energy usage at different times, and in different regions of the UK. This empowers manufacturers to understand how their emissions differ between two user-defined time-periods, for example before and after implementing energy efficiency measures or installing on-site generation assets. To allow for better comparison, the information provided can also be normalised by certain productivity factors, such as turnover or hours worked during the two comparison periods.
• The ‘Energy Benchmarking’ dashboard allows manufacturers to compare their energy use metrics to other, similar, companies. Using anonymised and aggregated data shared by SMDH members, this comparison can highlight best practice and encourages an increased focus on energy efficiency and can help highlight the importance of this topic to senior stakeholders within management teams.

How to take part

Manufacturers who would like to learn more about the SMDH project and are interested in taking part can learn more on the project website: https://smdh.uk/

To register interest for analysis of your energy data you can start here: https://smdh.uk/manufacturing-energy-insights/

Services provided by the SMDH to manufacturers are free and there are options to get involved in the SMDH community of manufacturers, or work with our data scientists on data collected from sensors provided by the project.