In our continued look at ProModel for AutoCAD, Inventor, and Factory Design Utilities, we take a look at Sustainability Initiatives and Overall Project Viability.
Perhaps one of the toughest sells for project capital is getting the idea across to the internal parties that need to release the funds even when you know it is a slam dunk for the company. Proving that something will save the company money in the long run as well as provide a cleaner solution for workers and the environment is usually met with the proverbial..."Show me the numbers." remark.
So lets examine a current situation where we have the current criteria for a manufacturing process. In this example we have a small product mix that creates issues for manufacturing growth due to large changeover times for products on old machines as well as an antiquated gas fired process that creates a large carbon footprint.
The process begins with laying out the existing environment with validating current metrics to within ~5% of real life output results. This creates the baseline for the optimization from descriptive analytics (fancy word for hindsight). The power of this baseline becomes the gold standard for not only this capital project but also line balancing, shift outages, breakdowns and more that is still important leading up to the change over of any new proposed solution. We even have a linked Revit model that when architectural changes occur it will update our factory layout in Inventor in real time so we can see when any structural, HVAC or other building changes occur.