Vernay shows how machine-level energy insights can be effectively used for benchmarking

The start

Wim Veelders, Senior Manufacturing, Maintenance and Facility Engineer at Vernay, is responsible for the improvement of operational processes and the reduction of the production costs. He met Sensorfact via NRK, which is the Dutch federation for the rubber and plastics industry, where he was participating in a user group where companies in the rubber and plastic industry were looking for possibilities of reducing their energy consumption.

I wanted to place energy sensors on our machines, however, these measuring systems are quite expensive. Sensorfact could provide us a cost-effective solution.

The solution

Energy sensors were placed on different machines such as the injection moulding machines, air compressors, cooling compressors, refrigerated containers and pumps. By installing sensors on the same type of machines, they could benchmark their machine performance and make data-driven investment decisions. Then one of their suppliers came up with a new machine including a new type of hydraulic pump as an energy saving measure that would reduce the energy consumption of that machine with 50%.

We installed the sensors on both the old and the new machine to see the effect and found out that the new machine indeed consumed 50% less energy than the older one. We also have seen the opposite situation where the old machines consumed less energy than the new ones.

The results

Sensorfact energy management solution helped Vernay to gain more insights into its energy flows and used the data to build business cases for new investments. An interesting finding is that the energy consumption data allowed them to gain more control over their processes. For example, if the energy consumption suddenly increases, it can indicate that the refrigerant pipe is clogged.

We have been working with Sensorfact for almost three years now, and I am really positive about the collaboration. The system is working great and any problems are quickly solved by the Sensorfact support team.

Currently, Vernay is working on creating a global KPI for energy management which allows them to benchmark the performance of their different facilities. They also want to start implementing the Sensorfact solutions in their other production locations, such as Italy.