Energy Efficiency

Current political developments regarding the withdrawal from nuclear energy will probably result in an additional increase in energy costs over the next few years. This increases the relevance of reducing energy consumption in production for industrial enterprises. Thus, in addition to quality, cost, delivery reliability and flexibility, energy efficiency is integrated as an additional performance criterion in the decisions of production managers. An important instrument to increase energy efficiency in production processes is the implementation of energy management. This paper presents the advantages of an integrated energy management and outlines the main tasks and methods. IT solutions are presented that assist companies in configuring and controlling production processes to become more energy efficient.

During the last decades, automotive manufacturers have outsourced many processes. Hence, complex networks consisting of automotive manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers have grown in the automotive industry. The resulting transports of components in these networks often require special load carriers. Consequently, companies nowadays face the challenge to handle a growing number of load carriers. For improving the load carrier management a higher transparency is required regarding the load carriers in the whole network. Transparency can be assured by the application of radio frequency identification technology. However, especially logistics service providers have to invest in this technology, which can be implemented in different ways. In this paper, some application possibilities are described and analyzed regarding economic and energy efficiency.

In many industries the success of companies depends on efficient and sustainable processes: In which way higher output can be achieved by less resource consumption? Many process optimization projects improve single processes but not the whole process chain. Thus a high amount of potentials of resource efficiency are unutilized in manufacturing. For realising enormous achievements energy and resource efficiency have to be integrated into the optimization process.

The article presents an approach for the integration of the energy efficiency in factory planning processes. The main focus is not on the constructional hull but rather on the energy-efficient designing of production processes and production plants. The approach is of general validity but in the present example it is applied to the automotive industry. Main contents of the approach are aimed at the life cycle consideration of production plants.