A Manufacturing Energy and GHG Emissions Monitoring System – Supporting Eco-efficiency with Business Intelligence

Abstract

Eco-efficiency is an emerging manufacturing trend aimed at improving manufacturing companies’ sustainability balance sheets. Eco-efficiency practices focusing on energy or material flows are critical to reducing the environmental footprint of manufacturing processes of sustainable companies. This paper presents development of a new integrated energy and GHG emissions monitoring model and system that combines business intelligence (BI) with eco-efficiency to aid managerial decision making at various levels of a manufacturer. This combination enables near real-time calculation of eco-efficiency metrics key to green manufacturing companies, such as energy consumption/production output, and tracks the progress over time. By using critical BI techniques such as star-schema data models and contextualization, energy or GHG emissions associated with production activity can be allocated dynamically, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as value-added energy and non value-added energy can be calculated for eco-decision making