kWh per produced unit (v50)

With Opticloud you have the ability to analyze your energy consumption in high detail with the granularity you need.

In Opticloud we are used to getting thousands, even millions, of parts per day per machine.
It’s not unlikely that we see customers who have an extremely high output in parts.

No matter how fast you produce, we can see exactly how much energy you are spending to create each part. This enables a much higher potential to optimize both production and energy demand.

Optimizing costs with kWh per produced unit

So how are our customers using this metric to optimize both energy and efficiency at the same time?

Energy efficiency

Looking at the energy consumption/demand itself, you can use the data to see available hours for production throughout the day. You can then plan production based on when energy prices are the lowest. You can also get kWh prices in the platform as well, even up to 24 hours ahead.

In Opticloud you also have data for the orders/items you are producing, through this, you can also see what orders/items have the highest energy demands and the lowest efficiency.

This way you can plan the orders/items with the highest energy demands at times when kW prices are the lowest.

Planned maintenance

Doing maintenance when the machine has broken down, is the most expensive type of maintenance you can do. Not only will it push the production and delivery date of your order, but it’ll also take much longer time and affect many more people around the machine. Suddenly you have operators waiting for the technician, maybe you don’t have spare parts in stock and maybe it’s 3 in the morning and you need to wait for a technician to arrive.

Doing planned maintenance before the machine breaks down, either on an interval or when you can see that the machine actually needs it, saves you a very significant amount of time, resources and money.

On top of this, you can plan your maintenance for when the kW prices are the highest as well. You’ll easily be able to see when you have space for maintenance and when in this period the prices are highest.

Reducing kWh per produced unit

The other way to cut energy costs is to cut down on energy consumption itself. You can do this in several ways.

Turn off stuff when it’s not needed

With Opticloud you also have the ability to control things on a factory and machine level. Some of the stuff we do today are: controlling truck charging, turning lights on/off, controlling heat, and turning machines on/off.

When the operators go on break or are done for the day, we can automatically turn off and shut down things that are not critical. This way your workers don’t need to change their behavior, they just need to concentrate on doing an awesome job.

Having fewer changeovers saves time and reduces the number of hours your machine needs to be running.

Having a dynamic production is becoming a high demand for a lot of branches in the industry. Customers have an increasingly higher interest in the customizable product. This means that we are seeing an increase in changeovers and more complex machines in production.

Changeovers can take significant time off your production time. This means you have operators running the machine for longer. Maybe you need to run it in two shifts instead of one or maybe you are even considering 24-hour production. If this is because of a higher increase in sales, good for you, but more often than not we see customers need to take this approach because of more and more complex products.

By logging all changeovers and logging all order/item numbers we can easily see what takes the longest to change and where the errors are happening. When you have all the data it’s way easier to plan out production with the fewest amount of changeovers needed to finish all orders.

This decreases the amount of time your machine needs to be running and with that saves you a large sum of money in kWh per produced unit.

Speed up production, increase performance

The better your machine is running the more units you can produce for the same amount of energy.

If your machine is running, you need to make it as optimized as possible. The faster you are producing the more orders/items you can finish, that’s a given. But what it also means is that you are producing more orders/items for roughly the same amount of energy. This will be machine-dependent, of course, but we have enough data to say that it’s a general tendency.

Idle time is also a significant factor. The time when your machine could be running, but is just sitting idle because of an error or changeover. The better performance you have, the less amount of energy for the same product is required.