Driving behavioural change and delivering savings via ENMAT

Background

Vast experience in machine tool manufacture and applications makes Yamazaki Mazak UK a leading force across many industry sectors. Its manufacturing plant in Worcester also houses the European Technology Centre, where clients have direct access to support and innovation from a large team of expert machine tool and automation engineers.

The company’s UK power bill of more than £1 million per year was under scrutiny in the knowledge that energy was being wasted on site. However, the business only had fiscal information from the monthly invoices, with no detail about where their energy was being used. This high-level data made it impossible to identify areas where savings could be made.

The site is also covered by ESOS (the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme) and ISO90001.  The ability to show where and how savings could be made would be an important step to better compliance with these schemes.

Yamazaki Mazak needed to introduce energy monitoring & targeting at the site and initial investigations had suggested that an M&T system of 21 submeters would meet Mazak UK’s needs. A flexible and intuitive software platform was also requested, to maximise usability and minimise the time required to produce meaningful results.

Solution

Mazak turned to Envantage for an expert perspective on the initial recommendations. A site survey quickly showed that better granularity of power consumption across the site could be delivered in a cost-effective way by implementing Envantage’s flexible ENMAT system.

Around 70 submetering points were chosen for the initial installation. Mazak’s Facilities Manager said:

“I liked Envantage’s matter of fact approach, challenging what we thought we wanted and explaining why we needed more metering points to drive savings more quickly”.

A submetering network has been installed in the various manufacturing zones of the factory, along with the client demonstration area and offices. Data from these submeters is automatically captured and Envantage’s cloud-based data analysis solution enables it to be delivered to any device, 24 hours day, anywhere in the world.

Complete with Yamazaki Mazak branding, the ENMAT software system houses a customisable dashboard which can be displayed in the reception area and on the factory floor, as well as the facilities manager’s office. Manufacturing departments also have touch screen monitors available, so displaying ENMAT reports and dashboards is a simple step for the company to make energy accountability a reality on site.

Instant results

Yamazaki Mazak quickly identified some surprising statistics about their own energy use, with the potential to use activity-based accounting to assign costs to the correct production departments, offices and showroom. Energy performance is now accountable and is reviewed regularly in company meetings and weekly toolbox talks.

ENMAT is already driving behavioural change on site. There is currently no weekend production, making machine overruns very easy to spot quickly. Not only can energy consumption spikes be seen clearly using the visual dashboards, but their cause can be rapidly found by zeroing in on individual meters using the flexible software front end. As a result the production teams have become much more active in managing machine shutdowns at the end of production runs.

In short, implementing ENMAT has allowed conversations about energy savings to happen which were not possible before. Immediate savings have been found which can be built into the site’s working procedures and made sustainable. Effective measurement has enabled proactive management of energy consumption.

The company is now considering a solar array to improve the sustainability of this flagship European site. ENMAT will enable data from this to be fed into the system, making it possible to measure the benefit of the installation.