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ESIM Chemicals is a leading global supplier of agricultural and crop protection chemicals and intermediates and is headquartered in Linz, Austria. Founded 80 years ago, the company today focuses on synthesis services for high-quality chemicals and is one of the top 3 suppliers of complex molecules worldwide in this field. ESIM Chemicals also offers fine chemical products that are of crucial importance for numerous industries.
Challenges
- Increasing competitive and efficiency pressure in the growing custom manufacturing business
- High customer requirements in terms of quality, safety, health, environment and delivery reliability
- Sustainability and cost pressure due to considerable energy and raw material consumption
Customer benefits
- Support for the energy saving project
- Around 120,000 m3 of cooling water saved
- Continuous improvement of day-to-day business through faster analysis and detection of deviations
- Contribution to improving production throughput from campaign to campaign, up to doubling or tripling it
- Fast implementation through support and skill matrix
- Rapid increase in sustainability by recognizing unknown patterns
Solutions
TrendMiner as a replacement, supplement and extension of the Process Historian’s existing Trend Viewer tool to provide users with an industrial analysis platform.
“TrendMiner is integrated into our process landscape as part of our digitalization initiative and is paying off for us – with the help of the software, we have been able to save around 120,000 m3 of cooling water per year and further advance our energy-saving project”
Martin Schnellendorfer,
Responsible for Operational Excellence at ESIM Chemicals
Solutions
TrendMiner as a replacement, supplement and extension of the Process Historian’s existing Trend Viewer tool to provide users with an industrial analysis platform.
Wanted: a catalyst for continuous improvement
ESIM Chemicals has an enormous amount of chemical know-how and process engineering expertise, which the company uses to carry out complex syntheses for demanding customers in large-scale plants. With success: the company is one of the top 3 suppliers of complex molecules worldwide. Its customers come from the agrochemical sector and industry – including manufacturers of food, animal feed and pharmaceuticals. Raw material and energy efficiency, as well as quality, delivery reliability and safety, play an essential role for ESIM so that the company can not only maintain its position in the growing custom manufacturing market, but also expand it further.
ESIM has recognized this challenge and is relying on a continuous improvement system that it has set up as a process landscape based on the DMAIC method with Lean Six Sigma experts. Until now, however, it lacked a reliable, convenient and, above all, fast self-service analytics tool to drive forward data-driven operational excellence. ESIM has found this tool in TrendMiner and uses it as part of the Lean and Six Sigma training courses, particularly in the analysis and control phase.
Found: An analysis tool to get to the bottom of the data
“At ESIM, we are proud of our awards – including the EcoVadis Gold Medal and ISO certifications in the areas of quality, environmental, energy and safety management. But we want to keep getting better for our customers – we are now achieving this with the rapid analysis options provided by TrendMiner”
Dr. Frank Wegener, CEO at ESIM Chemicals.
Before the implementation, analyzing the production processes was only possible using separate statistical tools, which was associated with time and effort for ESIM. With TrendMiner, this now works like magic – sources of error are automatically uncovered, trends are predicted and fast, data-based decisions are triggered – all without a special data science background.
A new dimension of quality management
The software is part of the production processes and supports continuous improvement in day-to-day business: data-supported dashboards, on which contextual events and discrepancies in processes are displayed, form the basis for root cause analysis and make fingerprinting possible. All current and previous deviations can be seen at a glance and provide the basis for further improvements.
The dashboards provide all users – including people on shift – with an overview of the plant/processes in just five minutes, saving them 20 minutes a day that they can use for further improvements.
The initial results following implementation are impressive: The ESIM team has achieved a significantly faster throughput of products from campaign to campaign. ESIM found the introduction of TrendMiner to be quick and successful, as the software fits perfectly into the existing PDCA system. Good support and a skills matrix that focused the training sessions and picked people up according to their individual level of knowledge also helped.
Energy consumption as the key to operational excellence / Chiller use case
Energy is the topic today – especially for a chemical company that consumes an immense amount of energy in basic operations such as extraction and distillation. To improve this initial situation, ESIM has taken the right step towards greater sustainability with the help of self-service analytics – as the example of cooling water savings shows. Originally, the aim was to use analytics to achieve electricity improvements in peak consumption machines without losing production capacity. In the case of the fully automatic chiller, it quickly became clear that only small amounts of electricity could be saved, but all the more cooling water, namely around 120,000 m3. By using TrendMiner to find a correlation for optimising the cooling water, ESIM was able to save energy costs with this and several similar applications as part of an energy-saving project. This is a concrete example of how data-driven analysis can save costs.
Chiller use case example as best practice for all users
The use of TrendMiner has resulted in a significant improvement for ESIM during day-to-day business: the data analyses paired with the contextual knowledge about the machines have also provided new insights into cooling water reductions. The company wants to expand this approach by mapping all products on the dashboards in the next step. The company’s aim is to find further undiscovered patterns in the future that focus on sustainability and efficiency in order to become even better for their customers.
Success Story & Real Life Use Cases
Finding the Right Solution for Its Environment
Total wanted a powerful analytics solution that would complement its existing data infrastructure. Listen to Fabrice Leclerq explain how it came to select TrendMiner as that solution for a pilot program.