Real-Time Energy Data Unlocks Valuable Insights for Industry

In the new ‘Internet of Things’ world, where business insights and actions are being shaped by data science and machine intelligence, getting real-time granular energy data was a challenge for the team at Rayven, an IoT solutions platform provider.

That challenge led Rayven’s chief commercial officer, Paul Berkovic, to seek out Wattwatchers Digital Energy.

Now pilot projects are underway and Rayven is taking data feeds from Wattwatchers energy monitoring and control devices into its software backend, helping to provide its industrial clients with support on energy efficiency, predictive maintenance and more.

Berkovic says that with the extreme rounds of price hikes for business electricity customers in recent years, energy consumption is on the radar for Rayven’s clients.

‘Rayven is essentially a data plan for IoT and industrial efficiency,’ according to Berkovic. ‘We gather and process a lot of different data and find new efficiencies - mainly cost savings, but sometimes new products too.

‘Energy consumption is a key concern. But collecting energy data on its own is never enough. For example, you might have high energy use on a machine, but it might also be a highly productive machine.

‘So Rayven might, for example, combine energy data with production throughput data and deliver a metric such as “energy consumption per unit of product produced”. That is what the platform does.

‘Energy data is critical and Wattwatchers’ devices have made it incredibly easy to get the data and use it quickly.’

Wattwatchers’ James Clements, who leads business and product development for the commercial and industrial sector, says that finding highly-innovative, tech-savvy industry analysts and advisers like the Rayven team is a real breakthrough.

‘The environments they work in are typically quite complex,’ says Clements, ‘and because they are in the IoT business they are hungry for real-time data, the more granular the better, which is exactly what Wattwatchers does for electricity.’

Berkovic sees ongoing opportunities for continuous improvement, with permanently installed Wattwatchers devices underpinning a real-time operational dashboard.

‘We are talking to businesses where energy is a major cost for them,’ says Berkovic. ‘The initiative to improve may start with efficiency, but it open spills over into other areas. They get insights into how their operations really work, at a machine level, by shift, by product line and so on.’

Rayven works across a range of industrial sectors, including food and beverage with machines like packagers, block-cutters, check-weighers and conveyor belts all using electricity; or textiles with a range of printing machines; or plastics recycling with shredding of waste and extrusion processes.

‘Idle energy consumption is the low hanging fruit,’ says Berkovic. ‘We delve deeper into what are the insights for efficiency improvement. For example, energy insights can help to deploy people better by comparing shift efficiencies.

‘People do take energy consumption seriously. It’s a top 3 or 4 issue for many, with the rate of energy cost increases recently helping us to get our foot in the door on this issue. Often it is a conversation about energy management, and that starts by understanding where and how they are using energy.

‘In many cases Boards are demanding to understand energy use better. It’s all part of Industry 4.0. That’s a big wave and it’s being driven by IoT. We will be able to monitor across whole operations in the future, in real-time, with rapid action on insights.’

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