Fujitsu Helps Stanley Electric Cut Energy Consumption at 27 of its Main Plants Worldwide

OREANDA-NEWS. April 05, 2016. Fujitsu today announced that it has built a system for Stanley Electric Co., Ltd. that collects in real time, and centrally monitors at Stanley Electric Group headquarters, the power used by its Group companies, including 27 principal plants⁽¹⁾. As one part of its company-wide efforts to reduce power consumption, Stanley Electric has steadily deployed the new system from July 2015 at each of its plants, and has now commenced operations at all plants in Japan.

Power utilization data at each plant is measured using a variety of systems and sensors, converted to a standardized format and consolidated at a single location. It is then displayed graphically over FUJITSU Sustainability Solution Environmental Management Dashboard, which shows each plant's energy utilization, progress toward energy-saving goals, and performance relative to other plants in an easy-to-understand format. This helps executives, plant managers, and staff better grasp the conditions at each plant and overall conditions at plants across the board, so decision-makers can give faster and more accurate guidance, and provide operators the support they need in their energy-saving efforts.

Fujitsu will continue to contribute to Stanley Electric's efforts to achieve its greenhouse gas emissions reduction target under its environment-related long-term management direction.

Background

Stanley Electric has set a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target under its environment-related long-term management direction, and is pursuing an ambitious energy-reduction program at all its Group locations in and outside of Japan, including at offices and plants. To achieve its goals, Stanley Electric needed to go beyond the conventional wisdom of having only on-site people in charge quantify energy usage and think about how to reduce it. They considered creating a system in which everyone in the company took action to save energy, and that tracked power consumption not just on a weekly or monthly basis, but that could also monitor on a daily and even hourly basis in order to facilitate immediate action. Stanley Electric also anticipated that, particularly for the plants, sharing information laterally would lead to significant reductions in power consumption through aggressive implementation of measures that had already achieved results at other plants.

To meet these requirements, Fujitsu built a system at Stanley Electric's 27 main plants that reveals various aspects of the energy-savings programs to all the staff, including real-time status of electricity consumption, progress toward energy reduction targets, and comparisons between plants.

System Features

1. Visually represents each plant's current power utilization status

The system can show power utilization status and progress toward targets for individual plants and for all the plants taken together, at various time increments, including monthly, daily, and also in real-time. For information to be grasped intuitively, the various plants are displayed on maps, color coded to show the difference from targets, and a month-by-month graphical display on when goals are forecast to be reached. With a comprehensive birds-eye-view of world and Japan maps, "drilling down" enables the status of respective plants to be understood in detail.

2. Compatible with various power-monitoring systems and sensors

The system takes data from the many different power-monitoring systems and sensors from multiple manufacturers that have been installed at each of the plants, converts their interfaces and standardizes their formats, consolidating it in a central location. Because Fujitsu was able to quickly build a system that centralized data from all the plants, those plants were able to start putting that data to work more quickly.

3. Communications features

The system includes a communications feature for posting comments on views showing trends in power utilization or the progress in energy-saving activities, to be shared with plant managers, executives, or people at other plants. This helps get everyone on the same page, and improves lateral communications between plants to help them accelerate improvement activities.

Future Plans

Since deploying this system, Stanley Electric has reevaluated its power utilization, and has made progress in reducing power usage at each of its plants thanks to lateral communications and sharing of power-saving techniques.

Fujitsu is helping companies by developing extensions for the Environmental Management Dashboard that help it address operational issues other than power consumption, and that help companies improve their production systems in general, with lower manufacturing costs, tighter delivery schedules, higher yields, and better quality.

For more information