Method to increase resource efficiency in production with the use of MFCA

Abstract In order to decrease carbon emissions and to address the problem of resource scarcity, the production industry as major consumer of energy and resources is forced to act and increase the resource efficiency of their production lines. However, for production managers it is often hard to determine, how and where to start implementing efficiency measures to reach the highest positive impact. The Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA), a method that became increasingly important over the last years, has proven to be a suitable tool to visualize and assess resource waste with resulting CO2-emissions as well as costs. Though, a stringent approach, how to get from the completed MFCA to the identification of appropriate resource efficiency measures and how to evaluate the impact of these measures is lacking. This paper therefore presents a method to derive and implement resource efficiency measures in production with the use of MFCA to find hotspots. The method includes the goal definition for resource efficiency, the gathering of resource transparency of the production process with hotspot methods, the implementation of the MFCA itself and the systematic analysis of the gathered results. The method is applied in the two production lines of the Energy efficiency, Technology and Application center (ETA) and the Center for industrial Productivity (CiP) at Technical University of Darmstadt, where a representative product is produced within an agile production network.