Manufacturing — automotive, plastics & rubber

Tier 1 and Tier 2 plants tend to have excellent data about parts and almost none about the utilities that make them. Compressed air has no meter, demand charges are absorbed into an overhead line, and the presses that matter most are often the ones without a PLC. We meter what exists, integrate what is already there, and leave the controls alone.

The compressed-air system is usually where the first month pays for itself. Air is the most expensive utility per unit of work in the building, it is almost never sub-metered, and a leak makes no noise anybody can hear over a stamping line. A Sunday leak-down test against a permanently installed flow meter turns “we probably have leaks” into a list of cells, in order, with a number beside each one.

Electrical demand is the second. A demand charge is set by a single fifteen-minute interval, which means a plant can pay all year for one afternoon when the dryer regen and the compressor happened to call together. That interval is invisible on a monthly bill and unmistakable on a minute-resolution trace, and once you can see it you can schedule around it — usually without buying anything.

Then there is the equipment itself. A bearing changes its signature weeks before it seizes, and the plants hurt worst by that are the ones running assets old enough that no vendor supports them any more. Those are exactly the assets we can instrument: a vibration sensor on the housing, a current transformer clamped on the motor feed, a 4-20 mA transmitter tapped off whatever the machine already outputs. Nothing is ripped out, nothing writes a command back, and no line stops to install it.