Automotive Supplier Mubea Unlocks a Flood of Water Savings

Mubea reduces water usage by 3 million gallons in just one facility with the Urjanet-EnterScape solution

With increasing pressures on the global water supply and concerns about water-related risks, Mubea, a leading international automotive supplier focused on producing lightweight materials, has moved water conservation and water efficiency to the forefront of its corporate agenda. Mubea has pledged to reduce its energy and water consumption, help protect the environment, and continue to create innovative solutions to curb carbon emissions. With such strong commitments in place, Mubea began to form and implement its energy and sustainability management strategy. Mubea needed to develop a way to benchmark, monitor, and then analyze its utility consumption in order to understand how to most effectively improve the resource efficiency of its operations.

Lack of centralized utility data management

Despite its strong stance on sustainability, Mubea quickly ran into a number of roadblocks. Mubea was interested in participating in demand-curtailment programs offered by several of its utility providers, but the company had no easy and quick way to measure and validate its performance during demand-response events and calculate its return on investment. This discovery shed light upon even larger problems. Mubea had no cohesive, timely solution in place to monitor and compare the utility consumption and costs of its internationally dispersed facilities, let alone to evaluate the performance of individual pieces of manufacturing equipment. Consequently, the company found it impossible to gain both critical high level and facility-specific views of its energy and water usage and costs. Its manual entering of utility data into disparate, static tracking systems was no longer sufficient.

Without access to timely, accurate, and complete utility bill and consumption data for its manufacturing plants and no single system in which to store and interpret the data, the company had no visibility into how, when, or where it was consuming energy and water. If Mubea couldn’t even assess how it was currently doing from a sustainability perspective, how could it prove to stakeholders that it was making progress? How could the company properly target under-performing areas and prioritize improvements?

Combining utility consumption data with cost data provides crucial insights

Determined to overcome these obstacles, Mubea began to explore energy and water data collection and monitoring solutions. After evaluating numerous software systems and applications, Mubea selected the Urjanet-EnterScape solution. Randy Williamson, EHS & Energy Specialist at Mubea, explains, “The Urjanet-EnterScape solution gives us insights into how much it costs to make our products in different regions around the world and how we can improve facility operations. With Urjanet’s timely and standardized utility data integrated directly into EnterScape’s utility data management software, we can see at any time how much we are using and spending on energy, water, and other resources across the board. This information has helped senior management identify our less efficient processes and enabled them to prioritize energy and water efficiency projects with the best returns.”

Measuring the impact of cost savings enabled by new insights

One especially notable achievement is Mubea’s reduction in water consumption by three million gallons, saving $100,000 annually, in just one facility. With its new solution, Mubea is able to quickly identify and financially quantify water leaks and inefficiencies and take the necessary actions to mitigate risks and respond to unforeseen events. Equipped with the right tools, Mubea can now focus on areas that will help the company achieve its sustainability goals and ultimately meet stakeholder expectations.

Global water conservation efforts driven by world’s largest companies – and their investors

While Mubea is a great example of how a large global company has taken the driver’s seat on managing its water and other environmental impacts, it is certainly not the only one. Kimberly-Clark aims to decrease its total manufacturing water use by 25% by the end of 2015. Coca-Cola has already lowered its water use ratio by 20% from 2004 to 2011 and plans to become water neutral by 2020. Due to further strains on water resources and unprecedented environmental challenges, investors and other stakeholders are increasingly requesting corporate water disclosure information. A survey conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) revealed that ultimate responsibility for water issues lies at the board level for 62% of corporate respondents. We will likely see more companies, especially those that are resource-intensive by nature, take on water and sustainability management challenges, as Mubea has, full force.

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Read the Urjanet-EnterScape Customer Story.

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• Breaking Through to Gen Z with Better Data

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