The Challenge
A personal care products manufacturer operated four compressors serving blending, filling, and packaging lines. Utility consumption was tracked only at the monthly bill level. When air consumption rose 14% over one year with stable production, no one could explain why.
The problem was cross-departmental invisibility. Production owned output metrics. Maintenance owned equipment. No one owned utilities per unit. The increase had three causes: a new product line with higher pneumatic demand, leaking actuator connections on one filling line, and a third-shift habit of leaving air-powered equipment running during cleaning cycles. None were visible without branch-level flow metering correlated with production data.
What Changed
Flow meters at 18 branch points, integrated with the production data feed. Air per unit, air per SKU, and air per shift became visible metrics alongside OEE and throughput.
Line 3 was consuming 34% more air per unit than Lines 1 and 2 for identical products — the leaking actuator connections. Third shift was consuming 28% more air during cleaning than the other two shifts — equipment being left running. The new product line's demand was correct; it simply hadn't been accounted for in the utility baseline. All three causes were identified within the first month and resolved.
Results
within 6 weeks
all 3 causes identified
for the first time
from leak repairs and behaviour change
“Monthly air bills tell you the total; they tell you nothing about what drove the change. Air per unit is the metric that connects utility spend to production decisions — and once it exists, the reasons for waste become obvious rather than mysterious.”