Manufacturing — automotive, plastics & rubber

Tier 1 and Tier 2 factories usually have excellent data about parts and almost none about the utilities that make them. Compressed air has no meter, demand charges disappear into an overhead line, and the presses that matter most are often the ones without a PLC. So we meter what is there, connect to what you already have, and leave your 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 factory can pay all year for one afternoon when the dryer regen and the compressor happened to call together. You will never find that interval on a monthly bill, and you cannot miss it on a minute-by-minute trace. Once you can see it, you can usually schedule around it without buying anything.

Then there is the equipment itself. A bearing changes its signature weeks before it seizes, and the factories that get hurt worst are the ones running assets old enough that no vendor supports them any more. Those are exactly the assets we can put a sensor on: 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 puts out. Nothing gets ripped out, nothing can write a command back, and no line has to stop while we install it.