In this 18-minute podcast, Emerson's Ana Gonzalez Hernandez and Chris Hamlin describe how research into manufacturing resource efficiency is translating into better solutions for optimizing material usage, reducing energy consumption, and operating more sustainably. The Operational Certainty consulting team can help your organization plan and execute a path to more efficient and sustainable manufacturing.

Transcript

Jim: Hi. This is Jim with another edition of the "Emerson Automation Experts" podcast. And today, I'm joined by Ana Gonzalez Hernandez and Chris Hamlin and we're going to talk a little bit about resource efficiency. But before we do, let's find out a little bit more about them. Ana, let's start. Give us a little bit of your background.

Ana: Hi. I studied my undergraduate degree at Imperial College in London. I did mechanical engineering and then I did a PhD in Cambridge. My PhD was funded by Emerson. I've been working for four years on resource efficiency. Trying to help companies reduce their energy and material consumption and looking at developing new methods to understand resource efficiency in a way that is more holistic and integrated. And from there, after a few years of the PhD, Emerson started seeing a lot of value in the work. And when I finished my PhD, they offered me a job to try and develop an engineering solution within Emerson. I've been working under the Operational Certainty consulting team since I finished my PhD in March. I started working in May—it'll be now five months.

Jim: Well, it's great to have you aboard with Emerson. Chris, give us a little bit of your background.

Chris: Okay. I've worked for Emerson for 10 years. Joined as a chemical industry business consultant, done a variety of roles since then, and now look after our new Operational Certainty consulting practice for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. And I'm lucky enough to actually have Ana on my team. I'm very excited about the whole kind of concept of resource efficiency and where we're going with it.

Jim: Okay. Great. Can you tell us a little bit more about resource efficiency and what the potential is there for our customers?

Ana: Yes. I guess maybe going back a bit and talking about where the idea came from. In Cambridge where I did my PhD, we were looking into material efficiency which is basically looking at ways of reducing material use in big process industries, and we were also looking at energy efficiency. How do you reduce energy use? Then we realized that actually, there's very little understanding of how the two come together. How do you make sure that you reduce your material and your energy use and not...you know, there's trade-offs between the two.

The consumption of resources is linked and making sure that you're actually reducing energy overall to make changes to your material use and vice versa but also realizing that when you reduce material use, you are reducing energy use as well, because materials take a lot of energy to actually convert. It all started by seeing that there was a lack of metrics, a lack of an analysis, a framework, to actually have a complete idea of how the plants are operating in terms of their resource management. Basically, the work that I was doing in Cambridge was exactly coming up with ways of measuring, having indicators that bring the concepts of energy and material efficiency together and also using Emerson's expertise in process automation.

The fact that we can have access to a lot of data now, you have sensors, the whole digital transformation space, and making sure that we can use that data to actually inform our resource efficiency as well.

Jim: Chris, how does that tie in with the Operational Certainty consulting with having this framework and that part of it? How does that come together?

Chris: Okay. The whole basis for around what we do with Operational Certainty consulting is look to imp...