The Challenge
A large automotive ancillary plant managed electricity through the electrical team, compressed air through maintenance, and water through facilities — each with its own records, reporting lines, and metrics. When energy intensity rose steadily over three years, there was no mechanism to identify which utility or area was responsible.
Cross-departmental investigation, when finally triggered, took three weeks to assemble data manually from logbooks, billing records, and production reports. The analysis revealed that compressed air accounted for 61% of energy intensity growth, electricity 24%, and water 15%. But the data was 30 days stale by the time the analysis was complete — and by then, the causes had partially corrected themselves, making root-cause confirmation impossible.
What Changed
A centralised utility monitoring platform: electricity sub-metering at line level, compressed air flow at 16 branch points, water flow at six major circuits — all feeding one dashboard, updated every minute.
The integration changed the management conversation. The weekly operations review now included utility per unit across all three vectors. In the first month, three anomalies were identified that had each been visible to one department in isolation but invisible in aggregate: a compressed air leak, a water circuit running continuously in a shutdown retrofit area, and an electricity draw spike every Sunday night from a cleaning contractor leaving heat treatment ovens energised.
Results
within two quarters
each cross-departmental
“Utilities managed in silos produce silo-shaped improvements — incremental, disconnected, and invisible to anyone outside the silo. When electricity, compressed air, and water are visible in one place, patterns emerge that no single team could see alone. The insight that matters is often the interaction between them.”