The challenge:

The Foyle Food Group is a meat processing group that comprises 4 distinct and separate meat processing facilities to accommodate slaughtering, deboning and rendering with a capacity of 200,000 cattle per year. The annual energy spend across the group is in excess of €6M. It was vital to get an insight on water usage in each facility.

The initiative to install an Energy Monitoring and Targeting (eM&T) System at Foyle was lead by the group CEO who realised that it was imperative to get a granular view of electricity and water usage in each facility if they were to make a significant impact on reducing energy usage across the operation.

• Electricity, water and temperature points were monitored extensively across all plants
• Ability to integrate existing metering and instrumentation from third parties
• Energy and temperature information was made available to management through energy dashboards 
• KPIs were created to allow performance comparisons to be made relating energy usage to production
• A range of custom reports were designed which would be relevant to various members of staff and delivered on a daily and weekly basis
• Public dashboards were installed on the factory floor so that shift supervisors could monitor production related electricity and water usage
• An easy and intuitive system was provided which allows managers to apportion cost to various processes and cost centres
• Access to the system was provided for a total of 35 different users with access levels limited to their relevant function, from supervisors, to managers, to group level directors and the CEO

• Significant savings in water use were identified which reduced water usage by 50% in one of the plants
• Ongoing monitoring of data indicates a complete return on investment within year 1 of installation
• The system is yielding
  significant savings through behavioural changes in production areas using live dashboards