Challenge
Bharat Forge was planning to build a new casting house at its production facility in Brand-Erbisdorf, Eastern Germany in 2013. Since the use of an energy management system was required – one that must be certified for high energy users, such as Bharat Forge – it was decided during the planning process to look for an efficient, modern and sustainable energy management solution to replace current practices, which comprised the manual capturing of meter data throughout the facility.
A vital focus was on the implementation of a solution that provided real time information about assets using the most energy in order to mitigate peak loads, reduce energy cost and define energy costs per product. Another important aspect was to accommodate the various legal requirements regarding the documentation of energy usage and the availability of appropriate, actionable reports to allow for quick and efficient decision making.
In addition, the energy reporting was to be mostly automated, moving the focus from manual data entry to one that would define and mitigate unnecessary energy usage and improve troubleshooting. Looking ahead, it was also important to Bharat Forge to use a system that could be easily administered by its own staff instead of an external agency.
While an energy management system was implemented, increasing demands and other changes made decision makers at Bharat Forge reconsider their initial decision and extend their search for a system that could do a whole lot more than energy management in terms of analysis and reporting. To do that, the new system had to be able to handle various types of meters (gas, water, electricity) as well as different fieldbus systems and protocols.
Eventually they decided to go with a solution comprising hardware and software automation components from Rockwell Automation.
