Monitoring Utility Use at a Brewery

Breweries use a range of utilities during the manufactire of beer such as electricity, water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and trade effluent. It is important to monitor the use of these to ensure that the plant is operating at peak efficiency.

Objective

A large brewery asked Meniscus to provide an intelligent monitoring system for their process. The system needed to integrate into their existing set up and translate the raw meter readings already available into meaningful information on utility use and cost throughout the plant. The system was then to be used to continually monitor performance and warn operating staff if the process went outside predefined operating limits.

Inputting Raw Data

The process was already fully metered and used a number of existing management systems to monitor the instantaneous values for the various utilities. The Brewery was able to take automatically exported meter reading files and email them to Meniscus for reading directly into the IPMS database for processing. Further analytical and production data was gathered by the operating team, entered into a spreadsheet on site and again emailed to Meniscus for automatic entry.

IPMS's calculation engine was then programmed to process the raw meter readings into cost and consumption data for use in the analysis and reporting phase. No extra instrumentation was needed for IPMS.

Implementation

To provide the data analysis required we split the site into a number of different process functions. For each process function we measured the utility use and IPMS translated this raw data into the cost and performance figures. Working closely with the brewery we were then able to benchmark each process function and set individual targets based on the volume of beer brewed.

The whole monitoring system was fast and easy to set up. With no extra meters required and no need for any software to be installed on the brewery systems disruption to the plant was practically nil.

Outcome

The brewery now has a centralised system for monitoring utility use throughout the process plant. The information provided by IPMS is in an extremely accessible format - cost and consumption - with full access to the real time data for those operators who need it. All levels of personnel have access to the information with customised reports depending on their job functions.

The automatic monitoring system provides immediate e-mail notifications to the relevant staff whenever the process runs outside its target performance bounds.

Detailed reports are automatically generated and formatted to a number of preset styles. These have been incorporated into the existing internal systems to help improve overall plant performance.