Energy efficiency involves more than sustainability. It has a noticeable effect on competitiveness especially in the packaging industry, where unit costs must be calculated with an extremely sharp pencil. At Filthaus, the iMAGOxt energy monitoring system from Wittmann helps company staff to keep an eye on all power consumption points, resulting in continuous production process optimiza-tion.
300 watt power consumption on standby - this is definitely too high for this production cell. But where does the current go? - Immediately after our arrival at Filthaus GmbH in the German town of Meinerzhagen, we are right in the middle of discussing this issue. Stefan Filthaus, Managing Partner of the company has just come from a meeting with the digital experts of the Wittmann Group, who had just no-ticed by accident that this particular injection molding cell was consuming a lot of energy although currently not in action.
Only a few weeks before, Filthaus had started up the iMAGOxt energy management system from Wittmann on its injection molding floor containing 26 machines, and the benefit has already proved enormous. “Without iMAGOxt, we would never have noticed the high no-load consumption of this work cell”, says Stefan Filthaus. “Now we can address this issue, eliminate the hidden electricity consumers and thus save several thousand Euros per year.” What is the practical benefit of iMAGOxt? We had arranged our meeting with Stefan Filthaus to find answers to this very question.
For ten years now, the plastics processor on Werner-Battenfeld-Strasse in Meinerzhagen has been a direct neighbor of Wittmann Battenfeld Deutschland, the German subsidiary of the Austrian Wittmann Group. “And it’s quite natural for us to look at what our neighbors are doing, and see what synergies can be found close by”, reports Stefan Filthaus. “iMAGOxt caught our attention. Such a tool was previously unknown to us on the entire market.”
iMAGOxt is a cloud-based energy management software which supports injection molding processors in analyzing, visualizing and optimizing energy consumption. To enable dynamic, real-time visualization of amounts and variations of energy consumption at all consumption points, iMAGOxt collects measurement data at certain consumption points, analyzes trends, calculates user-defined KPIs and visualizes all results in the form of very clear, self-explanatory graphs. “Energy transparency is not just an internal efficiency indicator, but a marketable asset that strengthens the company's positioning and credibility and thus enhances long-term business resilience,” emphas Federico Colombo, sales expert at Wittmann Digital, the software house within the Wittmann Group. “iMAGOxt is a perfect decision-making guide for actions to reduce energy consumption and the CO2 footprint.” Filthaus’ customer base includes several major corporations requiring from all their suppliers evidence of the CO2 footprints of the products delivered.
Clarity and easy operation meet with positive response
The Filthaus product portfolio consists of two major business segments of roughly equal : packaging and technical parts.
In the packaging sector, products such as screw-top and slip-lid jars are being made, together with matching lids, as well as double-walled jars and measuring scoops for food products, cosmetics and chemicals among others. The materials processed are polypropylene in large quantities and various types of bio-based plastics, as well as recycled materials coming partly from in-house recycling of sprue and scrap parts.
The technical parts division caters to users in various sectors of industry, including medical technology and health care, as well as the building and furniture industries. Here over one hundred different types of plastic are being processed by single- and two-component injection molding and mono-sandwich processes.
What both these business segments have in common is that a high proportion of the total unit costs is incurred by energy consumption. “On average about 20 per cent”, explains Stefan Filthaus. “In order to remain competitive, we must compensate the rising energy prices by reducing our energy consumption.” What is more, the practice of mixed costing may quickly lead to a loss of orders from the particularly price-sensitive packaging market. “With iMAGOxt, we are now able to carry out more precise financial evaluations of each production process”, says Filthaus.
Transparency for all consumers on the production floor - this is exactly the point, and in addition to the requirements of customers, this was the second motive for Filthaus to investigate the opportunities iMAGOxt had to offer. “I had this demon-strated to me at Wittmann’s technical center”, says Stefan Filthaus. “The clarity and simple operability of the software dashboard convinced me at once. I could see at a single glance how the energy management system functions and what it can achieve”, says Stefan Filthaus.
Monitoring of all consumers across all system brands
In addition to the software, the scope of delivery for iMAGOxt includes current measurement sensors, which transfer their readings to the software via a cloud. The sensors are installed on the individual consumers. Whether these are machines and auxiliaries from the Wittmann Group, or systems coming from other suppliers, is irrelevant. “iMAGOxt functions system-independently and just as reliably with machinery systems consisting of many different brands”, explains Rainer Grießmann, design engineer at Wittmann Battenfeld Deutschland, who supports Filthaus in the implementation of iMAGOxt.
