Devtank and Dr. Bruno Gallotta started working with each other through the University of Derby’s De-Carbonise smart factory project. This project was in partnership with the University of Derby, Devtank and Derby City and County Councils. Open to small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire (D2N2) regions. The aim with the decarbonise project is to enhance manufacturing efficiency, which produces cost savings whilst radically improving SME’s environmental performances. The project also helps businesses with; business improvement, sustainability and clean growth, supply chain improvement, and data science.
What are SME’s?
During the talk, Tim and Bruno mention SME’s a lot, but what is an SME?an SME is, as mentioned in the paragraph above, a small or medium-sized enterprise. SMEs represent 99% of all businesses in the EU. One third of our SMEs account to the UK’s green house gas emissions. Furthermore, SMEs make up 50% of business emissions and 70% of industrial pollutants within the EU. By 2050, the UK government aim to reduce carbon emissions and ultimately tackle climate change. One way we are doing this is by improving the efficiency of our manufacturers, from machine efficiency to better supply chains. Business who are already taking this on board are seeing benefits on top of the environment in the terms of lower energy costs and higher productivity.
Make UK
Dr Bruno Gallotta also brings us a study ran by Make UK which looked into the main disruptions for UK businesses. Aside from the effects from Covid-19, at the top were energy costs and material costs and availability. To businesses in the UK, energy costs have become a big issue, with some even closing their doors due to their bills being unsustainable. As Bruno touches on this, he explains that this comes off the back of the Russian crisis and how the UK are going elsewhere for our energy supply. Looking into material costs and availability, this has been something that has affected Devtank with our own production.
Battling efficiency with OpenSmartMonitor
As Tim delves into during his talk, we designed OpenSmartMonitor to be a tool for businesses to use in order to battle high energy costs and efficiency issues. With the use of live data and automated alerts, you can keep your fingers on the pulse! When utilising our sensors, you will be able to see your costs, weekly and monthly costs, emissions, and even machine efficiency. Without this data, you wouldn’t be able to see issues within your business.
Within the Devtank HQ, we noticed some unusual data being collected from our water meter. This showed water being used every 2 hours during the night and weekends whilst no one is in the building. We decided to turn off the water over one weekend and turn it back on when we were back in order to try and locate this possible leak. Sure enough, as it was off there were no data as the water was turned off, but as it got turned back on… our toilet began to fill up. The conclusion to finding this issue in the data was, every day that toilet would leak water until the flush was empty and began filling back up only to leak again.
To further the evidence of how our sensors can really make an impact on businesses, Tim and Bruno shared some of our case studies. Read these on our Case Studies page!
John Lennard from computing co.uk was in attendance at Tim and Bruno’s talk and wrote an amazing article detailing the problems we aim to solve! Net Zero: A $7 trillion open data problem