Bach Seat

Andrew Winston at the Harvard Business Review writes that opportunities for improving energy efficiency and saving real money are everywhere. The proverbial low-hanging fruit are actually, in the words of energy guru Amory Lovins, fruit on the ground. GM (GM) recently announced a new way to find easy pickings, a shockingly straightforward change in how it runs its manufacturing plants. The Detroit-based auto giant is saving $3 million annually in energy costs across 10 plants by shutting down equipment when it’s not needed.

Mr. Winston says the man in charge of the program is Mike Durak, the Global Program Manager, IT. According to the article, GM is using General Electric (GE) Proficy Software to automate the shutdown and restart of its equipment. It started simply enough, GM set the lighting in one plant to synch up with the conveyor. When the manufacturing line stopped, for breaks or between shifts, the lighting would shut off. Seeing the quick payback, the managers added all energy-using systems to this automated network, from heating and cooling systems to pumps and compressed air units. The investment in connecting an entire plant is paying back through energy savings alone in just 6 months.

HBR says that previously GM shutdowns equipment multiple times a day with a combination of manual shutdowns and unconnected, or “dumb”, automation. Basically, energy use would gradually ramp down after production stopped as equipment was shut off, and then it would ramp back up before the next shift. “Energy use was in a ‘V-shape’,” Mr. Durak said, “and now it’s more like a U.” (The author says, the difference between a V-shape and a U-shape is what’s saved).

Mr. Winston calls these sudden wins “headslappers” because they’re so obvious…in retrospect. The reasons we miss these easy wins are varied — from inertia to not being incentivized to find them to the classic problem of always addressing what’s urgent (something broken or a new process) over what’s important (getting leaner). Or perhaps a simple, cheap technological fix was not available until recently. In GM’s case, the big change is economically networking a whole range of equipment that wasn’t connected before. So with the new systems in place, managers can use the GE software to monitor and control the plant to a much finer degree.

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Maybe GM is getting smarter; they are figuring out what a “smarter” factory looks like. the Chevy Volt seems to be a “smarter” car.

What do you think?

What is your organization doing to get smarter?

Related articles:

• GM Rolling out GE Efficiency Program at 20 Plants

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.