Leading Asian Food & Beverage Group Achieves ESG Sustainability with iEMS, WISE-IoT Energy Management Solution

Due to the continuous rise in raw material prices and energy costs, the food and beverage industry faces increasingly compressed profit margins while competition intensifies. To remain competitive and gain an edge in the market, businesses must strengthen energy management and reduce consumption. This is exemplified by a renowned food and beverage group in Asia, which has implemented Advantech's WISE-IoT Intelligent Energy Management Solution (iEMS). By centrally managing data and energy usage across its factories in China, the group not only reduced its energy consumption, but now can also accurately allocate energy costs to each product, significantly boosting its market competitiveness.

Three Key Limitations of Manual Energy Management Operations

This food and beverage group currently has 35 manufacturing plants across China, all of which were previously managed manually. Each morning, a designated staff member would record energy consumption data and then manually enter it into an Excel spreadsheet. After the MES system calculated the production volume, they would then estimate the energy usage and cost

Li Jin, Business Development Manager at Advantech , highlighted that manual data collection is time-consuming and labor-intensive, causing several limitations in the group's energy consumption management. First, there is a lack of timeliness, as daily reports take hours of cross-departmental effort to compile. Second, energy consumption can only be managed at the individual plant level, making it difficult to perform horizontal and vertical comparisons across the group's 35 plants. Third, detailed energy cost control is challenging due to the presence of multiple meters in production workshops or on production lines, making it difficult to accurately distinguish the energy consumption of each line or piece of equipment. Therefore, energy cost calculations rely on existing rules and cannot be precisely allocated to individual orders or products.

Now, these issues are being resolved through Advantech iEMS's various I.Apps. Among them, the WISE-IoT facility management system automatically gathers relevant data on equipment operating status and energy consumption. The IoTSuite, an IoT platform, connects key equipment and meter data in the factory to the cloud for unified management. ECOWatch, the energy management system, uses built-in formulas to perform calculations and analysis, comparing categories such as products, production lines, departments, and plants. The results are displayed in visual charts, helping administrators better understand energy consumption and develop more effective energy management policies.。

Four Major Benefits Improve Energy Management Efficiency

Overall, after the group implemented iEMS, it not only overcame the limitations of manual energy management but also created four major benefits.

Moving forward, the food and beverage group will continue to strengthen its collaboration with Advantech, expanding the implementation of iEMS across more plants to automate data acquisition and explore additional energy-saving strategies focused on equipment energy conservation. This will accelerate the realization of the group’s ESG green energy and sustainability goals.

Case Benefits

1. Improved efficiency in collecting and summarizing energy data
2. Advanced from simple statistics to analysis, significantly enhancing the efficiency of energy utilization
3. Accurately allocated energy costs to individual products, facilitating production line administrators to actively reduce energy consumption through management mechanisms
4. Monitored the operating efficiency and energy usage data of key energy-consuming equipment to avoid unnecessary energy consumption

Advantech WISE-IoT Solution

WISE-IoT iEMS, the Intelligent Energy Management Solutions, include six key applications: CarbonR, ECOWatch, HVAC, Compressor, PHM, and MachineUnite. These solutions empower businesses to save energy and reduce emissions, achieving carbon neutrality and sustainability goals.

Company Profile

• Established: 1967
• Industry: Food manufacturing
• Headquarters: Taiwan
• Operations: Production and sale of instant noodles, beverages, biscuits, candies, and other processed foods
• Company Size: Multinational company

Know more about WISE-IoT