In this 18-minute podcast, Emerson’s Ana Gonzalez Hernandez and Chris Hamlin describe how research into manufacturing resource efficiency is translating into better solutions for optimizing material usage, reducing energy consumption, and operating more sustainably. The Operational Certainty consulting team can help your organization plan and execute a path to more efficient and sustainable manufacturing.

Transcript

Jim: Hi. This is Jim with another edition of the “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. And today, I’m joined by Ana Gonzalez Hernandez and Chris Hamlin and we’re going to talk a little bit about resource efficiency. But before we do, let’s find out a little bit more about them. Ana, let’s start. Give us a little bit of your background.

Ana: Hi. I studied my undergraduate degree at Imperial College in London. I did mechanical engineering and then I did a PhD in Cambridge. My PhD was funded by Emerson. I’ve been working for four years on resource efficiency. Trying to help companies reduce their energy and material consumption and looking at developing new methods to understand resource efficiency in a way that is more holistic and integrated. And from there, after a few years of the PhD, Emerson started seeing a lot of value in the work. And when I finished my PhD, they offered me a job to try and develop an engineering solution within Emerson. I’ve been working under the Operational Certainty consulting team since I finished my PhD in March. I started working in May—it’ll be now five months.

Jim: Well, it’s great to have you aboard with Emerson. Chris, give us a little bit of your background.

Chris: Okay. I’ve worked for Emerson for 10 years. Joined as a chemical industry business consultant, done a variety of roles since then, and now look after our new Operational Certainty consulting practice for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. And I’m lucky enough to actually have Ana on my team. I’m very excited about the whole kind of concept of resource efficiency and where we’re going with it.

Jim: Okay. Great. Can you tell us a little bit more about resource efficiency and what the potential is there for our customers?

Ana: Yes. I guess maybe going back a bit and talking about where the idea came from. In Cambridge where I did my PhD, we were looking into material efficiency which is basically looking at ways of reducing material use in big process industries, and we were also looking at energy efficiency. How do you reduce energy use? Then we realized that actually, there’s very little understanding of how the two come together. How do you make sure that you reduce your material and your energy use and not…you know, there’s trade-offs between the two.

The consumption of resources is linked and making sure that you’re actually reducing energy overall to make changes to your material use and vice versa but also realizing that when you reduce material use, you are reducing energy use as well, because materials take a lot of energy to actually convert. It all started by seeing that there was a lack of metrics, a lack of an analysis, a framework, to actually have a complete idea of how the plants are operating in terms of their resource management. Basically, the work that I was doing in Cambridge was exactly coming up with ways of measuring, having indicators that bring the concepts of energy and material efficiency together and also using Emerson’s expertise in process automation.

The fact that we can have access to a lot of data now, you have sensors, the whole digital transformation space, and making sure that we can use that data to actually inform our resource efficiency as well.

Jim: Chris, how does that tie in with the Operational Certainty consulting with having this framework and that part of it? How does that come together?

Chris: Okay. The whole basis for around what we do with Operational Certainty consulting is look to improve overall business performance for our customers and clients. We don’t really start with the technology. We start with the business drivers and the business strategy. And then what we do is we try to combine it. It’s the classic three pillars of people, process, and technology. Bring those together in a way that enable clients to be better at what they do. And we often talk about top quartile performance being the aspiration, albeit a lot of our clients are already at that top quartile level. But those that are recognize they need to work even harder to stay there.

Now resource efficiency is a really interesting metric when you come to look at it because most simply, it’s basically a measure of how much you get out of a process for how much you put into it. And it turns out that because of the ways that Ana and the team at Cambridge have put together the concept, it’s actually a very robust, rigorous metric. But the thing that’s really cool about it for me is it’s a measure that works at all sorts of different scales. You can apply it at the smallest piece of process equipment to a heat exchanger or a pump but it works just as well at the level of a company performance or even and, in fact, Ana’s done work in this space, even at the level of national economies.

Now, I can’t think of any other measure or metric of performance that scales in that way and that gives you that same clarity of insight at whatever level you’re operating. We’re really excited about this effectively new performance KPI that can be used in a really, really transparent way. By virtue of focusing on it and making improvements to it simultaneously will improve profitability and ensure that you’re improving your environmental stewardship. Now those are two things that often are at conflict with one another and this harmonizes the two together and operates at scale in a way that no other metric has before. For us, we anticipate it being the bedrock actually of a large part of how we’re going to take the operational certainty concept forward.

Jim: That’s really powerful that it can scale in that way and really be a guidepost. So, how would companies if they thought that there was room for improvement, maybe significant improvement, how would they go about starting on a journey to improve their performance?

Ana: Well, I guess data is always at the core of it. You have to collect data on your material and your energy flows and try and understand as much as possible where things are going, where things are being consumed and disposed. I guess having a complete understanding of the data flows is probably at the beginning of that.

Once you have an understanding of where the resources are going, then we can do what we call a resource efficiency analysis where we basically look at the quality of the materials and of the energy flow. Not just tracking the mass or the energy but also tracking the temperature, the pressure, the composition of the flows, so the things that actually give value to the streams making sure that we capture all of that in the same framework.

And once we do that, we can start tracking the resource efficiency. You know, as Chris was saying, this is scalable. You can track units, you can track plants as a whole, even sites. And once you start tracking and monitoring the efficiency, you can then identify hotspots, see where your biggest losses are and then start looking at ways of providing engineering solutions to reduce those losses.

Jim: Yeah. I guess that traditionally, a plant would have the instrumentation or sensors to perform the basic process control and safety shut down or whatever was required but not necessarily to track in this way. And I guess technology has come a long way to really open up the ability to be able to measure a lot more. Is that something that the consultants get involved with and helping companies find the missing areas of measurements that they need to be able to see how they’re doing?

Chris: Yeah… absolutely. As Ana said, the very beginnings, the very start of this process is really about closing your mass and energy balances. Now, that’s something that we’ve been talking about in industry for years if not decade