More than process control
When we think of industrial automation, it’s easy to jump to machine performance. Whether it’s reducing asset downtime or improving overall equipment efficiency (OEE), the emphasis has often been on process control. However, in many production facilities, large amounts of energy are also used to maintain the surrounding environment — heating, cooling, lighting and ventilating vast spaces. Here, Mark Richards, Sales Manager UK at Beckhoff UK, explains how manufacturers can more effectively optimise their facilities by looking beyond process control and adopting building automation.
Rising energy costs, targets and increasingly stringent regulations are all on manufacturers’ radars – and are inspiring urgency. For example, under the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR), large UK organisations must report their energy use annually or face financial penalties, including fines.
Manufacturers often understand that energy consumption is a major cost but overlook how much is spent on environmental control systems. Heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC&R) systems can account for over 60% of energy consumption in UK buildings.
In temperature-sensitive industries like pharmaceuticals and food and beverage production, it’s easy to see how costs can quickly increase.
It’s not just energy either. Building occupancy can pose challenges, with shift changes, partially used zones and quiet maintenance periods all muddying the waters. Ventilating and lighting unoccupied areas makes little sense, but often businesses will end up doing so because they rely on static timers.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is another important consideration. Left unaddressed, poor air quality can easily impact product quality and regulatory compliance. There’s also the impact on staff wellbeing, with long-term effects including increased risk of chronic respiratory conditions, such as asthma, as well as dementia.
Connecting the dots and breaking silos
This isn’t to say that industrial facilities aren’t already tracking occupancy, monitoring energy use or measuring air quality. However, these systems are often siloed — managed separately, logged independently in the building management system (BMS), and rarely brought together on the same dashboard.
This fragmented approach can make it hard for manufacturers and facilities managers to glean any meaningful insights from their building data. Monitoring CO2 levels is important for SECR reporting, but if that data isn’t linked to ventilation and other control systems, it becomes unclear where the issues are in the building and where intervention is needed. Consequently, manufacturers lose an opportunity to gain real-time data analytics and use these to make vital improvements.
By integrating these data streams, manufacturers can uncover relationships between building usage, environmental conditions and energy demand. For example, linking occupancy patterns to ventilation rates could reveal opportunities to reduce airflow in low-traffic zones or to increase it pre-emptively during shift changes. With better data visibility, facilities managers can shift from reactive to proactive strategies, improving efficiency while ensuring compliance and occupant comfort.
The importance of dynamism
Modern manufacturing is far from static. Equipment ramps up and down, maintenance activities occur outside of working hours and production can intensify and vary across departments and shifts. Nevertheless, many building systems are still operating on fixed schedules, meaning spaces are being heated, ventilated and lit regardless of who’s around and what’s happening in that area.
This is where dynamic control becomes essential. Unlike static timers, which operate building systems based on fixed schedules regardless of actual conditions, dynamic systems respond in real time to changes in occupancy or environmental factors, making them far better suited to industrial settings.
Air quality is a good example of why dynamic control is so important. If a rise in CO2 or volatile organic compound (VOC) levels is detected in an occupied zone, such as the factory’s offices, automated ventilation can kick in immediately. Similarly, if the space is unused for several hours, lighting and airflow can scale down. These adjustments may seem small, but over time, they contribute to significant energy savings and better working conditions for those on-site.
Beyond the production line
In most industrial facilities, automation is focused on the line. Manufacturers invest in sophisticated systems to ensure their machines operate at peak efficiency, with smart diagnostics, predictive maintenance and data-led optimisation. However, it’s important to look beyond the factory floor and to the wider facility. Here, you’d be surprised how much lighting, HVAC and energy infrastructure still use basic, schedule based controls, disconnected from the intelligent systems driving production.
The most efficient, future-proof factories are those where process automation and building automation are treated as part of the same ecosystem, not as silos. By unifying control at the facility level, manufacturers can improve energy performance, reduce operational waste and create safer, more comfortable working environments.
This isn’t about gathering more data — it’s about acting on it meaningfully. Using open, modular platforms, manufacturers can integrate building functions directly into their automation infrastructure. For example, Beckhoff’s TwinCAT suite of automation tools can transform almost any PC based system into a powerful real-time control platform for building services, which can also interface with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for monitoring and management. Engineers can use it to collect and act on data from environmental sensors, occupancy detectors and energy meters alongside their standard control logic.
Process automation is a staple of modern production, but manufacturers should not stop here if they truly want to optimise their facilities. Energy, air quality and occupancy are just some of the parameters that should be tracked, and this data must be readily available in a meaningful format, not siloed. Using this information, manufacturers can implement solutions like dynamic controls to ensure spaces aren’t being lit, heated or ventilated unnecessarily.
