If you have multiple machines producing the same product, knowing which ones use more energy per unit of production can allow you to shift production from less efficient to more efficient machines.
Alternatively, if you are running multiple shifts in a day, understanding your shift performance i.e energy intensity by shift will help in managing production teams.
Companies that achieve the greatest savings with Guidewheel conduct this review together as a team, daily or weekly.
The process
In the Production tab, pull up at least a week of Production and Energy Intensity data. You can display this information for as many days as you like.
If you select one machine or Group from the drop-down at the top, you can see a graph of both Production and Energy Intensity together.
Identify the days that have worse (higher) Energy Intensity for a given level of Production (as lower Production is often associated with higher energy intensity).
Dealing with abnormally high energy intensity
If energy intensity is higher than usual for a given level of production, open up another page with Diagnostics and pull up the time of that shift and the machine in question to investigate exactly what happened to cause the high energy intensity
In the Diagnostics page, Choose the machine from the top drop-down menu. Choose the exact date of the shift and click Go.
Observe if there was idle time, or unusually high power draw, or times when the machine was showing a strange energy use pattern.
If the cause of the inefficiency was idle time, follow up with the team.
If the cause was a machine showing strangely high energy use, that may indicate a problem with the machine.
Identifying shifts with low energy intensity
If energy intensity is slightly lower for a given level of production, you can follow the same process to identify what went right - for example, perhaps a new machine setting or loading pattern caused more efficient production! When you find these "bright spots," you can test them again to verify what procedures are causing better performance. Then, once verified, you can scale up these best practices to other shifts.