Spray Dryer APC Utilization

Critical Asset, Clearly Understood

The team focused on the spray dryer, the most energy-intensive asset in milk production. Key goals:

• Track APC (Advanced Process Control) activity over time
• Quantify operational days versus total period
• Gain insight into moisture-control performance
• Enable quick, repeatable reporting

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The Approach

• Focused Filtering: created a filter to isolate only the periods when the APC was operating, ensuring analysis on relevant data.
• Integral Calculation: with the filter enabled, used the statistics table and the integral function to calculate the total time the APC was active.
• Time Contextualization: compared the active time against the total time in the selected 3-month period to determine the exact percentage of operation.
• Repeatable Method: this approach can be easily reapplied to other assets, enabling consistent utilization tracking and reporting.

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Insight

By applying focused filtering and integral calculations, the team quickly quantified APC operational time and utilization percentage, creating a flexible method for monitoring critical assets.

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Results

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Takeaway

With focused filtering and integrals, the team achieved fast, accurate insight into APC usage, supporting optimization of a key asset and enabling smarter decisions for process control. Want to unlock insight from your own process data? Let’s talk.