Global Chemical Plant Automation

A large top-tier and one of the largest global chemical manufacturing companies, which manufactures hundreds of raisins and other chemical products for the textiles, tannery, and paint industries were seeking a solution at the manufacturing plant to ensure the quality and chemistry of its products. The system should automate its quality operations, manages raw materials specification, and details vendor performance.

The Implementation of SpectrumLIMS enabled complete visibility of quality operations and chemistry management for the laboratory and factory processes. It resulted in high cost of quality savings and enhanced product quality.

Selection of Sofcom

The company was looking for a scalable and robust quality management system for its manufacturing plant and labs. After extensively evaluating the competitive software offerings globally, SOFCOM’s Spectrum was selected just after the first meeting and product demonstration as the software was determined to meet the functionality, scalability, and performance requirements, along with Sofcom’s validated record of managing large operations in the industry.

Partnering with Sofcom

Sofcom teams worked with the plant team to understand and map the plant’s processes for Implementation and validation. The Sofcom team’s experience in plant automation was an excellent help for rapid Implementation, saving time and cost while bringing online the benefits of automated quality operations.

Challenges

To keep track of thousands of raw materials, chemical products and multiple plant processes to produce quality products for its customers, the company was seeking

1. An integrated solution to have a single view of lab and factory floor quality operations and real-time process visibility for quality control.
2. To keep a constant track of vendor performance on each consignment level to meet product quality and time-to-market.

Implementation

1. A committed team of Sofcom and the client completed the Implementation in a record time of 4 months with a complete sample, test and process mapping, and environmental compliance management.
2. Real-time visibility of quality control data, showing multiple process indicators with statistical process control charts and dashboard views.

Automation

1. Automation resulted in a transformation of product testing, and environmental monitoring, resulting in considerable cost and response time savings, ensuring rapid availability of results to support knowledge-based decisions.
2. Sample collection and test scheduling methods were streamlined for the laboratories that receive hundreds of samples daily for testing from production lines and other plant locations accelerating testing times.
3. Several complex processes were monitored, managed, and linked together to produce a holistic picture through real-time monitoring using SPC statistical analysis tools and dashboard views.

Results

1. The company achieved a holistic view of the entire plant and laboratories, which enabled proactive decision-making for a large operation.
2. It results in efficiency increases of up to 5%.
3. Environmental compliance management for quick problem detection and meeting environmental agency’s compliance.
4. High volume and complex laboratory operations were automated for faster turnaround time, reducing the cost of compliance, enhancing data integrity and multi-lab collaborative operations.
5. Better lab and production communication and enhanced collaboration resulted in operations visibility.
6. Being able to review, compare and interrogate data from multiple sources product reduced time to market.
7. Out-of-specification results or outliers seen for corrective actions and investigations.
8. Comprehensive vendor performance management, monitoring and action of pay for performance introduced.

Conclusion

Timely information dissemination and detailed functionality made it possible to manage large manufacturing and laboratory operations. Automation and system implementation that can provide visibility of multiple ongoing simultaneous operations provides the space for optimization. However, work done in silos and with limited overall visibility and coordination lends to low productivity and higher cost of quality.

Overall, Spectrum LIMS and Spectrum Process management solution dramatically increased efficiency and productivity and also decreased laboratory and factory operations waste. The company achieved a single view of its operations, eliminating human errors, and reducing the cost of quality while meeting environmental regulations.

Partner with Sofcom

Spectrum solution is an FDA and EPA-compliant data management system that ensures optimum quality control by real-time automated data acquisition and processing, result extraction, and process control analytics. In addition, spectrum solution architecture gives complete flexibility to configure the application according to your organization’s needs.

The scalability provides an opportunity to integrate multiple plants and laboratories at different locations in one window; with a user-friendly interface and graphical dashboards, it is easy to visualize real-time information, trends, and statistical analytics.