Monitor Hut Data Story

Nine lines. One number. No way to see which line was driving it.

A UK soft drinks manufacturer had nine production lines running across a single site. Energy use was visible at the top level, one meter, one monthly total, but there was no way to see how that total broke down line by line, let alone whether any one line was running less efficiently than the others.

The situation

The site produced high volumes across nine separate production lines, each with different equipment, different run rates, and different product types. A single site-level energy figure told the business what it was spending, but not where efficiency was being won or lost.

That distinction mattered more than it might first appear. Two lines could show identical energy consumption on paper while producing very different volumes of output, one line quietly running twice as efficiently as the other. Without a way to normalise consumption against actual production, that difference stayed invisible.

What the assessment found

• Existing metering, where it existed at all, was capable of showing consumption but not of connecting that consumption back to production volume.
• Simple line-by-line energy monitoring wouldn’t be enough on its own, it would show which lines used more energy, not which lines used energy less efficiently per unit produced.
• Building a genuine kWh-per-unit KPI meant metering needed to sit alongside production count data, not instead of it, so the two could be calculated together rather than compared after the fact.
• Across nine lines with varying equipment and run patterns, a one-size-fits-all metering approach wouldn’t hold, each line needed its own tailored point of measurement.

The insight

Energy per line tells you where the consumption is. Energy per unit tells you where the inefficiency is.

Most site-level energy reporting stops at the first question, how much did we use. The more useful question, especially across a multi-line production site, is how much did we use to make what we actually made. That’s a genuinely different metric, and it needs production data metered alongside energy data from the outset, not bolted on afterwards.

What we scoped

Monitor Hut worked through the site’s nine production lines individually, mapping out what metering and unit-count infrastructure would be needed to support true kWh-per-unit reporting rather than simple consumption tracking.

Because our platform builds KPIs like this natively, energy and production count data don’t need to be exported and reconciled manually elsewhere, the per-unit figure is calculated directly within the platform itself, line by line, as part of standard reporting rather than a separate exercise.

Why this matters now

Food and drink manufacturers working toward Net Zero commitments increasingly need more than a site-level carbon number. Businesses that have submitted targets to the Science Based Targets initiative, still a relatively small group of SMEs in the sector, are expected to show genuine, measurable progress against those targets over time.

Progress like that depends on being able to see efficiency at a granular level, not just whether total consumption went up or down, but whether the business is actually getting more efficient per unit of what it produces. That’s not something a single site-level meter can ever answer.

Not sure how your production data connects to your energy data?

Get in touch to talk through what a line-by-line energy and production assessment could look like for your site.

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