PlatformEnergy & production cost
Count the cost — energy monitoring software
Energy monitoring: cost per part, kWh per kg.
Every manufacturer quotes from a standard cost worked out years ago and adjusted by feel, and reports energy off a bill that turns up a month late. SmartFactory is energy monitoring software that measures at the machine instead: kilowatt-hours tied to the works order that drew them, added to material, labour and a fair share of your overheads. Out of one record come two numbers a UK manufacturer can actually use — a cost of production in pounds per part, and the energy-against-output ratio a Climate Change Agreement target is assessed on.
Your production cost per part
The number that ends the quoting conversation.
Not an estimate, not an allocation across the site — the energy that machine actually drew making that job, divided by the parts it made.
WO-2418 · Housing Rear · IMM-03
- Material At cost when it moved £1.31
- Labour Booked hours × rate in force £0.48
- Energy — job window Gross: includes between-cycle idle £0.06
- of which in-cycle only Comparable machine to machine £0.05
- Overhead 3 pools · planned-driver rates £0.29
- Energy is reported two ways and labelled: gross across the whole job window, which is what the part really cost the site, and in-cycle only, which is how you compare one machine against another.
- Material is valued at what it actually cost when it moved — the price on the movement, then the lot it came from, then standard cost — and each line names which basis it used, so a standard-cost guess can never dress up as a measurement.
- Labour comes from the hours booked at the job, at the rate that was in force when they were booked — setup at the setup rate, running at the production rate — so last year’s job still shows last year’s labour cost.
- Energy, material, labour and overhead are shown separately and summed — nobody has to take the total on trust.
- Standing charges are excluded and the card says so. They belong to the site, not to a part, and pretending otherwise is how cost-per-part numbers become useless.
- Energy is integrated properly across the job window rather than read off a counter difference — so a meter that reboots mid-shift does not hand you a fictional figure.
- Cavities multiply parts, not energy: a four-cavity tool makes four parts a shot, and the cost per part reflects that.
- If a job made no parts, the card says so instead of showing you £0.00 — a blank you can investigate beats a zero you might quote from.
- A line that cannot be measured says why, in words — no meter on the machine, no rate for the period — because an absent measurement and a measured zero are different claims, and only one of them belongs in a quote.
- Estimated carbon per part is reported from published factors, and always labelled estimated.
This figure is your cost of production — what a part costs you to make. It is not what SmartFactory costs you. The two are separate numbers and the product never combines them; see the pricing page for ours.
Specific energy consumption
kWh per kilogram is a ratio, and software is only honest about one half of it.
Specific energy consumption — SEC — is energy against output rather than energy in total. For plastics processors under a sector agreement the unit is kilowatt-hours per kilogram of product made, and a site that grows its output is not failing its target; a site whose energy per unit creeps up between assessments is. Here is exactly which half of that ratio this system measures, and where your own figures still have to come in.
- The kilowatt-hour half is measured rather than apportioned: metered at the machine, integrated across the job window, and attached to the works order that was running. A site-wide bill divided by site-wide output gives you one ratio every two years. This gives you one per machine, per product, per shift, over any period you choose.
- The output half comes off the same record — cycles counted at the machine, with cavities multiplying parts — so kWh per part is arithmetic the software already holds both sides of.
- The kilograms are yours, and that is the point: both halves of the ratio are measured where the work happens, and the step from pieces to kilograms is one multiplication against your own part weight — a number you control, rather than one that falls out of a demo.
- Because energy is attached to the job rather than to the calendar, the ratio cuts the way the improvement conversation actually goes: which machine, which tool, which product, which shift is moving it — while there is still a target period left to do something about it.
- Gross and in-cycle energy are labelled separately and never quietly mixed. Gross across the job window is what the part cost the site; in-cycle is how you compare one machine against another. A ratio built from the wrong one of those is not comparable with anything, including its own history.
- Estimated carbon travels with the same measurement, from published emissions factors and labelled estimated wherever it appears — it supports reporting and tender responses, and it is not a verified footprint.
Our guide to Climate Change Agreements explains the scheme — what the target is, how often it is assessed and what missing it costs. This page is the software that produces the numbers the scheme is measured on.
Target periods and evidence
At assessment, the argument is about the records, not the ratio.
A Climate Change Agreement trades a discount on the Climate Change Levy for a target on that ratio, reassessed every two years. The scheme rules are not ours and the guide says so. What a system is answerable for is narrower and entirely checkable: can it produce the same numbers again, months later, unchanged, in a form somebody else can audit.
- Every reading is kept. Full resolution for a configurable fortnight, then thinned to thirty-second resolution — and never dropped outright, so a period pulled a year after the fact still has a record underneath it.
- Thinning cannot move a historic figure: the sweep reproduces exactly the stream that was stored before the interval changed, so no energy, cost or peak figure restates itself behind your back. A number that changes quietly between two exports is worse than no number at all.
- Energy by machine, location and period is a query rather than a data-recovery exercise, and everything on screen exports. Scheduled reports covering energy and machine cycles arrive as branded PDF, CSV or Excel on your own schedule, in your timezone.
- Close the month and every rate and every job cost freezes. Reopening a period is possible and always leaves a name and a reason behind, so the version somebody reported from can still be identified afterwards.
- Every reading is timestamped from one clock, and rates are applied in your local time with British Summer Time transitions handled explicitly — the 23-hour day in March and the 25-hour day in October both land correctly, which matters more than it sounds when the period being assessed is measured in years.
This is energy monitoring software: it produces the measured numbers a CCA target period is assessed on, at the machine and tied to the works order. The scheme rules, your target and the submission itself sit with the Environment Agency’s guidance and your sector association, which are the authority — and we claim no certification of our own. It runs alongside whatever you use today; a quarter of measured data next to your current method is the fair comparison.
Overheads
A fair share of the rent, on the part that earned it.
Material, labour and energy are the easy part. What sinks a quote is everything else — rent and rates, supervision, the machine shop — carried whether or not the part was made. Most systems leave that to a spreadsheet. SmartFactory models it.
- Define overhead pools in your own terms — factory rent and rates, supervision, moulding-shop burden — as the monthly or annual figures your budget already holds, dated, so next year’s budget cannot rewrite what this year’s parts cost.
- Each pool spreads by the driver that suits it: machine hours, labour hours, unit volume or material value. Supervision by labour hours, depreciation by machine hours — the four bases your accountant already uses, chosen per pool.
- Rates are the pool divided by the planned driver for the period, never the actual — so a quiet month does not dress up as an expensive part.
- A pool can cover the whole site, one location, a work centre or a single machine, and pools stack — a press carries its own depreciation plus its share of the rent, and both lines are visible.
- Every job shows its overhead pool by pool: which £0.31 of moulding-shop burden landed on it, at what rate, on how many machine hours. A lump sum nobody can defend is not on offer.
- Under- and over-absorption is reported, not hidden. If the factory ran fewer hours than planned, you see exactly what the parts did not pick up.
- Close the month and every rate and every job cost freezes — the number you quoted from cannot move underneath you. Reopening a period is possible, and it always leaves a name and a reason behind.
Quote before the first part
The same answer, before a single part exists.
The cost card is retrospective — what the job did cost. Quoting needs the same answer in advance, from the same rules, so the estimate and the actual can be put side by side without an argument about method.
- Draw the process in the process designer and the estimated cost per part comes with it: material from the bill of materials, labour from the routing’s setup and run times at your rates, energy and overhead burden on top.
- The energy line comes from your own history for that part on that machine — and with fewer than a handful of real jobs behind it, it says so rather than guessing from one.
- A component with no standard cost shows as a gap with a reason, not a silent zero quietly flattering the quote.
- Add a stage and watch the estimate move — the costing conversation happens while the process is still a drawing, not after the tooling is committed.
- Estimate and actual sit side by side on the part, labelled — two answers to two questions, never quietly reconciled into one number.
Idle waste
Which machine burns money doing nothing.
Barrel heaters on overnight. A dryer left running over the weekend. Nobody is being careless — nobody can see it.
- Idle consumption is detected against a baseline the system learns for each machine from its own running history, so nobody has to sit down and set thresholds for forty presses.
- Events are classified rather than lumped together: Idle outside planned hours, Standby during a planned shutdown, and Unexpected Load when a machine that should be stopped is drawing real power.
- Each event is costed in pounds at the tariff that applied at the time, so “the weekend” becomes a figure rather than an anecdote.
- Short blips do not count: consumption must be sustained before an event opens, and it closes with hysteresis, so you get a league table rather than noise.
- An idle-waste league ranks machines by what they cost you while making nothing — usually the fastest payback conversation on the whole platform.
UK tariffs
Priced the way your bill is actually priced.
- Flat or time-of-use tariffs with day, night and red-band rates, set by time of day and day of week — the structure a UK industrial supply contract actually has.
- Tariffs are assigned per machine, per location or as a tenant default, so a site on a different contract does not distort group figures.
- Rates are applied in your local time, with British Summer Time transitions handled explicitly — the 23-hour day in March and the 25-hour day in October are both priced correctly.
- A tariff-band view shows whether you are running the expensive kit in the expensive band, which is often a scheduling decision nobody knew they were making.
- Change a tariff and historic analysis re-states cleanly, because the readings and the pricing are kept separate.
Peak demand
Find the half hour that sets your capacity charge.
- Half-hourly analysis by default, matching UK settlement periods and the way DNO capacity charges are levied — not an arbitrary hourly average that hides the peak.
- The maximum-demand interval is identified with its timestamp, so you can go and find out what was running.
- A load-duration curve shows how much of the year you spend near that peak — the difference between a genuine capacity problem and one bad Tuesday.
- Top contributors to the peak interval are ranked with their share, which is how a staggered start-up gets agreed in ten minutes instead of three meetings.
- Peak-demand and energy-spike alerts fire against a rolling baseline for the same hour of the same weekday, so normal Monday mornings stay quiet.
Metering
Measured at the machine, not apportioned from the bill.
- Per-machine live power, voltage, current and cumulative energy from clip-on CT meters — non-invasive, no rewiring, fitted by your own electrician.
- Heavy three-phase presses that consumer meters cannot handle are covered by MID-certified, billing-grade metering over Modbus TCP with split-core CTs.
- Every reading is kept, so historic analysis by machine, location and period is a query rather than a data-recovery exercise.
- Energy monitoring is included in every plan and every machine, not sold back to you per meter per month.
Carbon figures are estimated from published emissions factors and are labelled as estimates throughout — they support reporting and tender responses, and are not a substitute for a verified footprint assessment. If your sector holds a Climate Change Agreement, the same per-machine energy data is what a specific-energy-consumption number is actually measured against — see our guide to CCA targets.
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