Editorial staff: Why is the demand for "resource-efficient production" increasing?

Dr. Friedrich: The increasing scarcity of resources, due to the consumption-driven global increase in demand for industrial production, is driving the prices of sought-after raw materials to such a high level that their relevance in the calculation of manufacturing costs has increased significantly. Both future taxation concepts with regard to the CO2 consumption of manufacturing companies and the increased environmental awareness of product users due to current climate changes will lead to a higher demand for products that are manufactured as "sustainably" as possible from an ecological point of view.

The pressure that manufacturing companies are under to reduce their production costs is also increasing steadily. In the past, low wage costs have usually been the most effective measure for reducing costs. This has led and in some cases still leads to the relocation of production sites to so-called "low-wage countries".

In the context of such increasing globalisation effects, German companies now produce worldwide and have the opportunity to use the different labour cost, investment, tax and other conditions in the various countries to the benefit of their company. Small and medium-sized companies operating nationally or alone in Europe, which initially did not have these possibilities, were often threatened in their existence by the competition from internationally operating competitors or similarly large production companies located in the new competitor countries.

However, the COVID-19 virus pandemic, which has been rampant since 2019, has shown the limits of globalisation. In some cases, there are calls for a preferential regional supply of production-relevant goods.

Thus, an essential question for the medium-sized, regionally operating production technology in Europe is indeed posed: How can one react to all these development trends from a technically oriented point of view in order to sustainably guarantee the profitability of "domestic" production, as one of the important pillars of the European economy?

Editorial staff: So if the more efficient consumption of resources in production plants plays such a significant role in reducing manufacturing costs, how do you measure and evaluate it?

Dr. Friedrich: In order to be able to evaluate and optimize a value chain with regard to resource efficiency, an evaluation capability must generally be created first. For this purpose, the individual consumptions of all relevant consumption systems in a production company must be identified and measured in real time, digitized if possible. It must be possible to define individual areas of consideration as system boundaries, thereby making it possible to differentiate clearly between them and analyse their contribution value. To guarantee this in parallel for all machines of a production system in real time exceeds human capabilities by far. Software-based assistance systems are indispensable for coping with such highly complex optimization processes. Such assistance systems are based on algorithms, which in turn require a sufficiently large amount of data, a standardized data structure and high quality across all measured variables of a company's existing machines in order to be able to make successfully implementable recommendations for action. All hardware components required for the digitization of existing machines and technical components are supplied and installed by team Grindaix!

As a result, system boundaries arise on the customer side, within which a clean balance of the consumption of operating resources can be made in real time. Even from today's point of view, the mere sensor-based collection of consumption data does not pose a major problem. The measurement technology offers here many practice-proven possibilities which merge into a whole in connection with the industry-compliant digitalisation technology of Grindaix. However, the quality of a measured value and the sustainability of a sensor accuracy is decisive for the quality of a software-based assistance system. Therefore not every sensor is suitable for every task. We provide experience-based advice on when and where which sensor is suitable and economically viable.

But there are also negative effects that should not be neglected. The technical risks that a change in an individual consumption parameter can entail are not sufficiently recorded. This means that the technological dependencies of the consumers among themselves are not sufficiently described. Here, too, software-based assistance systems with "predictive maintenance" functions can be used to help companies both to save CO2 and to ensure high machine productivity with consistent product quality.

In this context, the question inevitably arises as to who is responsible, for example, for reducing the cooling water consumption in a production machine without being able to concretely estimate how this will affect the process stability or even the service life of the production system. Due to the complexity of the cause-and-effect relationship, such uncertainties can only be eliminated with digitized auxiliary systems.  As already mentioned, the essential maxim here is: "The higher the quality of the data with which such digital assistance systems are supplied, the higher is the informative quality of these".

We in team Grindaix see our task in collecting all relevant production data across all your existing machines in a professional manner and making it available at a central location in your company, secure against external access, in a standardised file format for further use (digital optimisation tools).

Editorial staff: How does the exemplary approach to get this complexity under control in a practical way work?

Dr. Friedrich: Within production technology, in addition to resources, there are different consumption groups that interact with each other in different ways in connection with the question of resource efficiency.

1. Production technology (manufacturing processes)
2. Production machines
3. Transport systems
4. Mounting systems
5. Industrial building
6. Products / CO2 footprint
7. Retrofitting / Recycling / C2C

All seven consumption groups can be projected onto the four resource groups mentioned above. This initially results in 28 different observation areas A_i to G_l, as shown in Figure 1-1-1, for which a balance of resource use can be achieved.

Figure 1-1-1: Scopes for the Evaluation of a Resource-Efficient Production Technology

One of the main requirements in this context is the ability to present balances of resource flows within the individual observation areas and their technical interaction mechanisms in an integrative approach in a complete and practice-relevant manner.

As an example, a process sequence within the consumer group A - "production engineering" can be described as a sub-system to which resources such as energy in the form of electric current and valuable material flows such as water, component materials, for example steel, and auxiliary materials such as tooling materials, lubricating oils and cooling lubricants are supplied. The system is exited by finished components, scrap parts, carry-outs such as cooling lubricant residues on finished components, vapours of vaporised auxiliary and operating materials, chips, waste water and process-related waste heat. The goal of a company is to optimize the efficiency of a value-added chain within these consumer group-oriented system boundaries with regard to the various value streams (resource groups) without endangering the process capabilities of the entire value-added chain.