Page 46 - Packaging News Magazine Jan-Feb 21

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FOCUS | INDUSTRY 4.0 www.packagingnews.com.au | January-February 2021
Smart factories
bring sustainability
If you’ve heard of Industry 4.0, a term coined in 2011, you will know the fourth industrial revolution is being heralded as a new way to manufacture products, John Broadbent writes.
THE Fourth Industrial Revolu- tion, or 4IR, is an enabler for what has become known as smart factories. This term describes a manufacturing facility that uses digital tech- nology to make visible what’s
going on inside it, as well as often externally along the supply chain.
When information within the four walls of a production facility is visible, all manner of advantages emerge. Being able to see and capture what’s happening in real-time means infor- mation flows between multiple sys- tems – and systems and people – resulting in agility, or as Bill Gates puts it, it increases business velocity.
In this world of ever-changing con- ditions, being a smart manufacturer makes total sense. It enables an organisation to respond to market pressures and customer demands and helps to minimise time-to-mar- ket. Imagine the impact such technol- ogy can have on the sustainability of a manufacturing business.
Areas of financial loss in a typical factory include the big three of waste streams: production yield losses; waste to landfill; and utilities consumption.
Each of these can be quantified as an initial starting point, then values are assigned to each percentage of improvement. For example, a one per cent reduction in annual electricity usage equates to ‘$xx per year’ in sav- ings, year-on-year. These can some- times be big numbers and can con- tribute significantly to profitability.
HOW DOES A SMART FACTORY
HELP WITH THIS?
While you can confirm your losses via variance reports for yield-related issues – disposal costs for waste and utilities invoices for power, water and gas – they are all lag measures. That is, you know well after the event (maybe a month or more) that you’re ahead or behind last month or the operating budget.
As a case in point, a client recently noted that in one month the compa- ny’s water consumption jumped from two million litres to three million litres, reflected in a 50 per cent increase in the water invoice, and with no idea how it happened.
In this instance, if the factory had digital meters on the utilities that mea- sured the main incoming usages and sub-meters throughout the plant, you could monitor these in real time. This would enable you to know exactly