Manufacturers Share Sustainability Wins

Basically, Colorcon's water discharge has to be regularly checked for pH and chlorine, so it replaced the chart recorder monitoring I/O in a remote shed with Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk VantagePoint and FactoryTalk Historian solutions.

"This means our operators can do much less data entry and get back to making product," said Jushchyshyn. "However, we can also identify and diagnose upset conditions much faster and access this data from anywhere. Our metering is also about 10% more accurate now, and the few water discharge issues we had each year have now dropped to zero." 

Goodyear Takes Aim at Energy Intensity

In addition, Aiman Abdrabou, global manager for energy and greenhouse gases (GHGs) at Goodyear Tire Co., explained that Goodyear has been developing and implementing more sustainable energy strategies for its 50 plants worldwide, including reducing the "energy intensity" of its production processes by 25% in 10 years and continuing to develop tires that save fuel for drivers.

"Energy management is exactly like a control loop that must be managed continuously, so we have to develop ongoing programs to achieve sustainability. It can't be done as a one-time project," stressed Abdrabou.

Consequently, Goodyear organized teams at plants in North and South America, including the world's largest tire factory in Akron, Ohio. Next, it developed energy performance metrics (EPMs) that it posted on online boards, which now include energy-use trends, charts and action plans, and are even used to host monthly meetings. To aid its sustainability program, Goodyear is also using Rockwell Automation's RSEnergyMetrix to monitor about 10,000 meters, organize and centralize their data, put KPIs on Rockwell Automation's VantagePoint dashboards, and generate reports to aid its optimization and sustainability efforts.       

"The part that made this affordable was that Rockwell Automation only charged by the number of licenses we implemented and didn't add on charges for different sites and facilities," said Abdrabou. "We've already saved two or three times over on the initial costs of this system. We estimate that this solution is going to save about $10 million over about 10 years for all the plants using it."

CIP Energy Eases Communication Tasks

To generate even more efficiencies and savings, these and many other applications can now use the new CIP Energy protocol recently developed and launched by ODVA with help from Rockwell Automation and its other members. CIP stands for "common industrial protocol" and includes a comprehensive suite of messages and services for the collection of manufacturing automation applications—control, safety, synchronization, motion, configuration and information.

"CIP Energy is just energy-related data in a structured payload," explained Cliff Whitehead Jr., strategic applications manager for Rockwell Automation. "It's an extension to the existing CIP protocols and is a native and transparent way to transmit energy-use information, instead of burdening users with all the code, spreadsheets and translation requirements of the past."  

Philip Kaufman, business manager for Industrial Energy Management at Rockwell Automation, added that, "In the past, gathering data from 300 I/O points in a typical application and configuring it to report to an HMI could take a couple of weeks, but now we can use CIP Energy to get up and running a in couple of hours. This is all just another part of our Integrated Architecture for Energy Management."

Kaufman added that CIP Energy is already native on Rockwell Automation's PowerFlex 755 drives and SMC 50 solid-state soft starter, and it will also be coming to other products soon. A toolkit will also be available shortly to help users apply CIP Energy in their devices and systems.