Solulever2023
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1 year ago Author: Sarang Gujarathi Client Partner Sarang, Client Partner at Solulever, holds 10+ years of experience working with leading manufacturing solution providers. He has diversified experience in the Chemical, Pharma, CPG, Automotive and Metal industries amongst many others. He is now heading PAN India sales at Solulever, with a focus on selling cutting-edge Industry 4.0 solutions and disrupting the manufacturing space with digital transformation.
Compared to other sectors, the industrial sector uses maximum delivered energy - 54% of the total global energy consumption. Within the industrial sector, the manufacturing industry ranks as the highest energy consumer, followed by the mining, construction, and agricultural sectors. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the percentage share of industrial energy consumption by the manufacturing sector was 77% in the year 2020.
As environmental concerns continue to rise globally, majority of the industries, enterprises, and governments have started taking serious initiatives toward the reduction of their carbon footprint. Several countries including the UK, France, New Zealand, and Norway signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, with an ambition to reach net-zero emissions by the year 2050. India aims to reduce its projected carbon footprint by 1 billion tonnes by the year 2030. Their ambition is to meet more than 50% of their energy requirement through renewable energy by this time. The US has set a target to reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by the year 2035. The issue of sustainability is prime for the manufacturing sector. Governments in different countries are taking steps to incentivize sustainable manufacturing and accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Even from an internal cost perspective, energy is a significant cost component in the manufacturing world and there is an ever-pressing need to optimize it for gaining a competitive edge in the market. Technology has always played a big role in the efforts toward energy optimization. The recent developments in the Industry 4.0 space, have taken the potential of data-led initiatives several notches higher in this direction. For example - real-time energy monitoring and energy control-oriented analytics are particularly of great value. Having said that, careful use of technology is a must to avoid these initiatives becoming counter-productive. Most of the solutions in this space require increased use of connected devices, which in turn leads to additional energy consumption.
Record: To create a baseline and to monitor energy consumption continuously, manufacturers need technologies that establish holistic connectivity on the shop floor, especially with the production equipment, supporting devices, energy meters, IoT sensors etc. Complexities here are majorly around the variety of communication protocols involved, a broad spectrum of integration needed, data volumes/velocity/variety, and OEM restriction, to name a few. Analyze : Depending on the use case envisioned, manufacturers may require both or either of ‘real-time’ and ‘post-facto’ analytical possibilities. It is also needed to have a real-time feed from IT systems for analyzing energy consumption around business variables like Batch ID, SKU number, Customer ID, Raw Material etc. Therefore a strong & real-time OT-IT integration becomes a must-have. Further, the correlation of data between energy meters and shop-floor machines is of absolute importance to create a granular mapping of how asset and process parameter fluctuation can lead to variable energy consumption per batch per SKU etc. Improvise : The insights from analytics pave way for timely actions towards improvement, optimization and cost avoidance. The insights are generally suggestive, that need to be acted upon at speed by stakeholders like operators, plant supervisors, automation engineers, plant management, continuous improvement team etc. Once a good level of confidence is established in the insights, closed-loop systems can be implemented to automate the actions towards energy optimization and proactive cost avoidance. Brabo Edge Platform® is one of the recent developments which help manufacturers achieve the ambitions spelt above and beyond” Brabo is a Manufacturing Connectivity & Intelligence platform developed by Solulever, a Dutch software startup, with an exclusive focus on the topic of Digital Manufacturing. Brabo is built on open integration, OT-first, Hybrid, Microservices and Headless architectural principles. These architectural choices make Brabo standout in the market, in terms of its comprehensive connectivity, high flexibility, intense scalability and extreme performance, while suiting almost any variety of OT/IT tech landscape existing in a manufacturing plant. The business value derived by the manufacturing operations ranges across the areas of asset utilization, material efficiency, quality improvement, energy optimization, sustainable manufacturing, operator enablement, labour efficiency, process improvement, service management and more. Specific to the topic of Energy Optimization, Brabo delivers end-to-end capabilities to Record - Analyze and Improvise. With its comprehensive and OEM-independent connectivity framework, Brabo reads real-time energy parameters from all the energy-consuming and energy-measurement devices on a shop floor. Similarly, Brabo seamlessly connects to IT systems like ERP, Recipe Management System, Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) etc., and delivers real-time streams of OT data contextualized with business parameters from the IT systems. Since Brabo has the capability to integrate with the energy meters and production assets in an OEM-independent fashion, it can analyze the needed data and help manufacturers optimize KPIs like Specific Energy Consumption (SEC), kWh per ton etc. The powerful, real-time streaming and analytics capabilities of the platform enable developers to build custom use cases in no time and without needing skills in any special proprietary technologies. The platform has its own Historian implementation, which allows for ‘store & analyzes’ capabilities needed for any ETL or post-facto analytics operations. Since Brabo integrates down to the OT level, it can directly feed the corrective interventions to the energy-consuming and energy-measurement devices - thus enabling automation in the energy optimization agenda. Brabo follows a well-balanced approach between Edge and Cloud. In large-size-plant situations, the majority of capabilities are rendered on the Edge (on-premise) side. Being close to the source of data origin and to the destination of analytics consumption, this approach avoids the latency and connectivity challenges, that are typical deterrents to real-time analytics and automation possibilities (like in pure-cloud models). Also, an Edge-heavy model is commercially better suited for large plants, which have high data volumes and prefer avoiding the tall costs of cloud storage. At the same time, the cloud side in Brabo’s Hybrid architecture is used for cross-plant benchmarking and reporting purposes. The weight of Edge versus Cloud reverses in smaller plant situations, where the data volumes are much lesser and the use cases are more post-facto and cross-plant in nature. This balanced Hybrid model also means that the overall carbon footprint of the solution is minimal. This revolution of new-age platforms like Brabo opens up a whole new range of possibilities for the manufacturing world to realize its sustainability goals. The added, yet significant, benefit also includes the differentiated competitive advantage manufacturers gain from the associated reduction in their cost of manufacturing. Stay tuned to read more about this revolution in the making!