Raw Material performance

Why improve its material performance?

Increasing raw material performance is a crucial issue for any manufacturer, for several reasons:

• Cost reduction: Better use of raw materials reduces expenses and increases margins.
• Optimization of resources: Less waste means more efficient use of materials, reducing procurement needs.
• Environmental impact: Increased material performance contributes to reducing the company's ecological footprint by limiting waste.
• Increased competitiveness: The improvement of material performance makes it possible to offer more competitive prices on the market.

In short, increasing material performance is an essential lever for improving the profitability, sustainability and competitiveness of an industrial company.

An approach: the material balance

The material balance is an essential tool for improving the material performance of an industrial company. Here's how to build and use it effectively.

Construction of the material balance

Material balance is a quantitative analysis tool that makes it possible to monitor and account for all material flows entering and leaving a process. In particular, it makes it possible to calculate the yields of the various unit steps and large process lines, but also to identify the flows that generate the losses.

Here are the key steps to build a material balance:

• Define the perimeter of the system: clearly determine the limits of the process or unit to be analyzed.
• Identify flows: identify all flows in and out of the system, including raw materials, products, by-products, waste, and emissions
• Quantifying flows: measuring or estimating the quantity of each material flow, potentially taking into account the volumes and compositions of each flow.
• Set up the necessary calculations according to needs: closing the balance sheet, determining theoretical flows or yield, calculating real yield, losses, etc.

An accurate material balance makes it possible to identify opportunities for optimizing processes, reducing losses and improving overall production efficiency.

Use of material balance to improve material performance

• Analyze losses: study in detail the differences identified to understand their origins (waste, out of spec products, evaporation, yields, etc.).
• Identify opportunities for improvement by prioritizing the losses that are the biggest or easiest to reduce.
• Implement corrective actions: optimization of unit steps, reduction of process variability, improvement of equipment, etc.
• Monitor progress: monitor the material balance over time to measure the impact of actions and adjust the improvement strategy.

By systematically using the material balance, manufacturers can identify sources of waste, optimize their use of resources and thus significantly improve their material performance, which translates into very significant economic and environmental gains.

Improve your material performance with OIAnalytics

Automate the monitoring of your material balance and your yields

Our tools make it possible, based on sensor data (weighing, flow...), flow composition analysis data, to calculate the flows on the process, to carry out mass balance on continuous or batch processes, to calculate yields, to calculate losses and thus to have all the information necessary to work on material performance. This is made possible thanks to our contextualization engine, which simplifies and automates the aggregation of data to transform it into relevant information.

So, you can build your tools for tracking and identifying losses. These tools allow you to prioritize areas of progress but also to monitor improvements following the actions implemented.

Tools to go beyond measurement

The OIAnalytics solution allows manufacturers who want to improve their raw material performance to go further than simply monitoring KPIs and losses. In particular, it allows industrials to:

• Analyze past performances to understand the causes of variability in yield or losses in order to optimize and control operational parameters.
• Solve material performance problems and understand why, over certain periods, certain batch series, the performances are lower than normal.

Use your data to improve material performance

As a result, you can better track and understand your material performance, understand the parameters that affect it, investigate the root causes of material losses, and thus take the right corrective and improvement actions.