Fima: efficiency and compliance for an energy-intensive business

The context

Fima manufactures electronic components and designs and produces high-technology printed circuit boards (PCBs), running its plant in Vicenza at maximum efficiency.

Producing circuit boards requires energy-intensive machinery: with more than 1 GWh consumed every year, Fima falls into the energy-intensive category, where controlling consumption is both a competitive and a regulatory necessity. A significant share of the spend, however, came from hidden consumption: machines on stand-by, inefficient operations, unplanned downtime. The company wanted to know exactly where it came from, when it happened and what it cost, so it could measure the return on every corrective action. Without that visibility every energy decision stayed a hypothesis, and every hour of waste ate into margin.

The project

Maxfone installed a network of IoT sensors on the machines, connecting them to the IDA application in a single centralised data flow. The system reads each machine's parameters in real time, namely energy consumption, CO₂eq emissions and operating costs, broken down by process stage and by individual asset.

Fima now has a clear, continuous view of what happens in production: granular, actionable information on how much each machine consumes, at what point in the day, and with what impact on the bill and on the environment.

The results

Energy-intensive companies consuming more than 1 GWh a year are required by law to have an active energy monitoring system, and IDA turns that obligation into an operational advantage. The results fall into three areas. Lower energy costs, because continuous monitoring surfaces unnecessary consumption and allows immediate action, with a direct impact on bills and operating margins. The actual ROI of each corrective action. And CO₂eq emissions tracking per production line, which supports environmental reporting, an increasingly relevant requirement in dealings with end customers.

What comes next

The next step is automating the supervision, control and correction of the machines, reducing manual intervention. Once fully in place, the system will allow costing specific to each order and asset, making waste analysis and its elimination more precise: a production process where efficiency, sustainability and competitiveness reinforce one another.