If your company is like most chemical manufacturers, your energy management program dates back years if not decades.
You may be monitoring energy use to control costs, or recovering waste heat to drive in-house processes. You might see energy management as a way to reduce your carbon footprint and lend a hand to future generations.
But what if the best reason to track energy performance has to do with the efficient, continuous operation of your most profitable production lines?
It’s no news that unexpected outages can cost chemical manufacturers millions of dollars in costly down time, lost batches, and snagged production lines. But according to How to fix your maintenance program, an Infor white paper written specially for enterprise asset managers, unexplained changes in energy use can be a sentinel for emerging maintenance problems.
“Measuring energy efficiency is one of the best-kept secrets about predicting failure,” the paper explains. “Energy consumption actually can indicate, far in advance of a failure, that a problem is developing.”
If energy use changes at a specific point in the production chain, that’s the place to start your inspections. Spotting a problem, and solving it before it gets bigger, might mean the difference between delivering a batch of orders on time or dealing with delays, rush shipping charges, and unhappy customers.
Integrating energy management with Enterprise Asset Management can also reduce energy consumption by up to 20%. And when a single 100-hp motor running consistently at 95% efficiency can consume $350,000 worth of energy over five years, even a 5% variance burns through a lot of money.
“By measuring consumption across each asset, you can identify equipment drawing more power than the manufacturer specified,” the white paper notes. The resulting alert “starts a chain reaction to determine why the asset isn’t performing at its optimum and correct it.”
Who knew that energy use could be your best marker for upcoming maintenance problems? What else would you like to know about optimizing your maintenance program? Download Infor’s new white paper, How to fix your maintenance program, today.
The post Asset Management: The Hidden Bonus in Tracking Energy Performance appeared first on Energizing EAM.
