Case Study:
Advisor saves Cregana Medical 27% in their annual energy Spend.
John Crane Ireland reduces manufacturing energy consumption by 25% in 12 months
Challanges of energy spend:
John Crane (Ireland) Ltd has a workforce of about 100 and operates from a 40,000 sq. ft. facility in the Shannon Free Zone Co. Clare. It is part of the John Crane Group; an American company headquartered in Chicago with operations in more than 50 countries, which is itself a subsidiary of the United Kingdom technology conglomerate Smiths Group.
By 2011 John Crane (Ireland) had an upwardly trending manufacturing energy consumption of €80K per annum and was struggling to bring it under control. With no corporate energy policy in place and no idea where to attack the problem, they called for help and engaged with ResourceKraft to measure, interpret and analyse the problem and advise on a way to reverse the situation.
Benefits:
“For the first time we could see our out-of-hours consumption profile”, recalls Eddie Mulvihill, John Crane (Ireland) Maintenance Manager, “now we could take some immediate steps to reduce cost without impacting production.”
After a few months of data collection, the site had its own clearly defined manufacturing energy consumption baseline. Armed with this information, management were able to justify capital investment to replace inefficient equipment, and design process policy changes that reduced energy consumption without compromising delivery performance.
By now oil and gas consumption were also being monitored and the addition of 4 wireless meters allowed even more cost identification and elimination.
In the first year the electricity costs fell by €25K.
“As a company we are quite comfortable using international standards to help manage the business and are already accredited to ISO 9001, OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001, so we naturally looked to the energy standard ISO 50001 as the framework for our long term approach to this initiative.”
Report card:
“We used the ResourceKraft Advisor system to systematically chase down costs by identifying opportunities, quantifying the cost/benefits and launching Energy Management Programs to address the most promising candidates.”
“It also allows you to set up 'events' and automatically contacts the right people when a predefined condition has been reached. Right now we have event monitoring on the Compressor, Main Incomer, and two selected sub-boards of particular interest”
“Once we began to use the information from ResourceKraft Advisor, we saw a 20% reduction in electricity usage in 12 months. A year later John Crane Ireland became the first site in Smiths Group plc to achieve ISO 50001, and four years on we’re still seeing incremental cost improvements.”
