According to Rockwell, the multiyear initiative will facilitate Kraft's understanding and management of how energy is used within its plants and help the company identify opportunities to reduce energy costs through lower consumption.

"Finding ways to reduce energy demand is fully consistent with our drive to achieve efficiencies in all aspects of our business," said Fred Sherriff, vice president of manufacturing technical services for Kraft. "It is also consistent with our efforts as a responsible corporate citizen to reduce the environmental impact of our operations."

By using Rockwell Automation technology, manufacturers can automate load profiling mechanisms and analyze power quality issues such as harmonics to identify energy consumption patterns, says the company.

"There's a common misconception that manufacturing-related energy costs are uncontrollable," said Al Hamdan, product marketing manager, PEMS. "On the contrary, quantifying energy consumption for various processes and identifying power quality problems will arm manufacturers with good information that will pinpoint specific operations where they can optimize energy usage. We're looking forward to applying our expertise to help Kraft with this very important challenge."

Publication date: 08/09/2004