A innovative data-driven platform to improve manufacturing energy savings through proactive, targeted employee interventions

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Behavioural change has an important part to play in continuing the momentum of energy-efficiency improvements made by UK industry over the past 20 year. As quick-payback technological solutions like LED-lighting have already been widely implemented, enacting behavioural change stands apart as being implementable without significant capital investment.Implementing behavioural change can however be challenging without good user engagement, and even harder to maintain in the long term, as old habits tend to easily resurface.Beacon Technology's innovation is a proactive energy-savings intervention platform. Using data-streams already available in a business (from MRPs, energy monitoring, machine output sensors) and configurable logic rules, energy-saving interventions can be issued to employees in real-time via SMS/in-app notification. Each intervention will explain the action to take, the potential benefit it will have, and ask the employee for feedback if they chose not to action the suggestion.The difference from current behavioural change practice in manufacturing is stark. Rather than a poster on a machine saying 'switch off after use', the machine's operator will receive a message saying 'Machine 1 will not run again for 4 hours. Switch the machine off. This will save 24 kWh of electricity and 5.5 kg CO2'.This project will develop a demonstrator-prototype of the proposed innovation on Beacon Technology's existing web-application, native-app and core back-end services, for trial at two energy-intensive manufacturing sites. The project will provide valuable feedback on ability to use existing business data-streams to generate real-time interventions, user engagement and comparative energy consumption against baseline data. The outcome for Beacon Technology will be significant progress towards an MVP solution for deployment and case-study/white paper information to support business development.