Integrated shop floor data management for increasing energy and resource efficiency in manufacturing

Increasing prices for energy, resources such as material-either externally purchased or internally manufactured-or labor inevitably result in the need to increase the efficiency of manufacturing processes. Furthermore, society requests documentation about companies' approaches for offering "green" and sustainable products. Therefore, the need for insight knowledge regarding the most influential processes, energy consumption (electrical energy, process heat and cooling, gas etc.) as well as material flow grows. Due to digitalization, the use of systems for production planning and control as well as the implementation of advanced sensors increase. Thus, the amount of shop floor data (e.g. power per operation, energy consumption, work orders, storages, stock removals etc.) grows heavily and complicates the use for gaining efficiency in the resources' use or the overall gain in productivity. Currently, lots of such data are not even used at all anymore although containing i mportant information about the processes' performance. Thus, this paper addresses the integration of shop floor data throughout all electronic systems (enterprise resource planning, manufacturing execution system, data logging by sensors) in a software landscape and describes how to connect related datasets automatically in underlying databases. This connection allows the choice of key performance indicators for individually adjustable scopes such as processes, facility, overall company and the differentiation between products for a certain time period. The results offer live information about energy and resource consumptions for monitoring purposes, the identification of potentials for improvement as well as an easy sustainabiliy reporting. For sustainability reasons, the calculated results can be used within life-cycle assessment software for the evaluation of the manufacturing's impact onto the environment.