Welcome to TETRIS, the way to Factory 4.0!
In this first season, you will discover our 5-step roadmap for improving your plant’s environmental performance.
Here are the 5 steps:
Step 1 – Taking stock to prepare the ground.
Step 2 – Detailed analysis, where we explore your plant in depth.
Step 3 – Adjustments to optimize your plant’s performance.
Step 4 – Guidelines and master plan, to define and structure your ideal factory.
Step 5 – Continuous improvement to sustain your environmental performance.
In this 1st episode, we’re with Sébastien Papouin, Energy Technical Director and co-founder of Dametis. Hello Sébastien, can you introduce yourself in a few words?
Hello, my name is Sébastien Papouin and I’m Technical Director at Dametis. I have 25 years’ experience in industrialenergy efficiency.
OK, great, thanks Sébastien! So, today, we’re starting with the very first step to take when you want to improve your plant’s environmental performance. This first sub-step is called initial mapping. But before we get to the heart of the matter, you’re going to tell us about Lego theory.
So, as a preamble, I wanted to talk to you about the lego theory. Every factory is made up of the same blocks, be they pumps, compressors, refrigeration machines, cooling towers and other equipment that you’ll quickly find in every factory, but no two factories are the same. It’s exactly the same with Lego: you give 2 identical boxes of Lego to 2 children, and they’ll build you a different object, so it’s exactly the same with factories. In fact, they’re all made from the same basic bricks, yet there’s not one that looks like another. The idea for us, then, is the same as for Legos: to deconstruct your factories to arrive at the elements that are comparable from one factory to another.
Before you can improve your plant’s performance, you need to know where you’re starting from and what ideal you’re aiming for. This theory makes it possible to define a standardized, cross-functional repository for comparing plants with each other, block by block. Each block will have its own business rules and data. I’ll leave it to Sébastien to define the initial mapping.
The initial mapping involves taking a plan of our plant and positioning the various production workshops, warehouses and utilities on this plan, whether steam, compressed air, refrigeration or other utilities or processes, in order to visualize our initial block, which is the plant in its various blocks and sub-blocks.
The idea is for this mapping to become a standard for you, i.e. when an auditor, for example an external auditor, comes to audit your plant, whether it’s an industrial energy audit or something else, they should do so on the basis of this mapping that you’ve standardized.
Sébastien, what are the prerequisites for mapping and how long does it take?
I’d say that it’s as simple as setting up a factory floor plan and dividing it up into the various blocks we want to list in our factory. In half an hour or an hour, the exercise is done.
Do all manufacturers carry out initial mapping?
It’s not a standardized step for manufacturers, who know their plants but haven’t necessarily mapped them. Some have done it, I’d say around 30% of manufacturers have. When you arrive at a plant and ask for a floor plan, you can already see this mapping visible on the floor plan.
Can you tell us who’s in charge of the initial mapping? How are things coordinated between the different teams?
This mapping is a consensus between all the plant’s departments (main departments) to agree on the standardization and mapping of its plant.
What are the difficulties of mapping?What are the pitfalls to avoid?
What’s difficult? Perhaps it’s simplifying your plant, especially when you have a complex plant with intersecting processes or process lines. This mapping has to remain relatively simple, and the trap would be to get bogged down in detail and have a mapping that becomes unreadable.
This mapping is the starting point, the entry point for any analysis of the plant, be it an energy audit or other, and will subsequently be used to contextualize the data.
In a nutshell
Initial mapping is the division of a plant into blocks. This breakdown into blocks becomes your standard to impose when an external or internal player comes to analyze your plant.
Initial mapping gives you a synthetic, global view of all your plant’s processes and flows.
It allows you to :
- Visualize all plant components, from raw materials to finished products, processes and utilities.
- Finally, it provides the basis for defining THE standard for your plant.
In short, initial mapping is the starting point for your industrial environmental transition.
