CASE STUDY B:

Chemical Manufacturer

The Company

A customer in the liquid chemical industry, filling toxic and corrosive chemicals, came to us with a request to collect as much information as possible from their filling operations. They had two, semi-automatic drum and tote filling machines, one stationary pail filler, and a mobile pail filler installed in three separate buildings, because some of their products were flammable.

The Goal

They needed to compare the filling rates of each product and determine the efficiency and safety of each filler on a daily basis. In particular, one of their foaming chemicals cost $2.12/lb. and, even though they were using two filling machines to obtain their production rates, they were getting different results. When they thought one filler was outproducing the other, they later found that both were inefficient.

The Results

Our customer purchased a software package called, Drum Filler in the Cloud, to answer their needs. This is a historian and analytics software that provides a report on every segment of their filling operations when they wanted it, and it was displayed on the manager’s PC, Tablet, or cell phone…critical information immediately available from one dashboard.

Drum Filler in the Cloud pinpointed all their inefficiencies and recommended new production methods to reduce the foaming issues, speed up production, significantly reduce downtime, and reveal any overfilling or underfilling issues in every operation…among other things.

Cost Justification

The most glaring report showed that by improving their foaming issues for a one-time cost of $250,000, their revenues increased dramatically.

In the foam filling operation, they were filling 310 drums/day = 80,600 drums/year
By reducing the foam by 20% in 55-gallon drums, they added = 16,120 drums/year
At 450lbs/drum and $2.12/lb. they gained additional revenues = $15,378,000/year