When Profits Are Hidden in Plain Sight

If you drive a car, then you probably benefit from McGard’s products.  Their proprietary lug nuts keep automobile tires where they belong – on your car.  In fact, McGard is the nation’s leading manufacturer of mechanical anti-theft devices.  When market demand outpaced McGard’s production capacity they focused their attention on existing production lines.  With the help of PlantESP the engineering team at McGard successfully tapped into opportunities that had been seemingly hidden in plain sight.

PlantESP is a control loop performance monitoring solution that is ideally suited for use at small to midsize production facilities.  Its architecture is such that it can be deployed rapidly.  It links directly to a plant’s data historian and automatically establishes KPI benchmarks for each PID control loop.  KPIs assess a broad range of issues affiliated with control loop performance, including controller tuning, process interaction, and – more notably – mechanical issues like Stiction.

“The value of information can’t be underestimated.  PlantESP enhanced our awareness and it equipped us with the information we needed to make effective decisions.”
Tom Lanham – Process Engineer

With the help of PlantESP the plant’s production cycle time was reduced by 9.3% and throughput capacity was simultaneously increased by 13.5%.  Profits found.  Problem solved.  Click Here to learn more about McGard’s challenges and how monitoring technology located their plant’s hidden profit potential.

These resources offer related content:

How Should Control Loop Performance Issues Be Prioritized?

Align the Approach for Prioritizing Control Loop Performance With Existing Automation Practices There are many paths to Heaven or so the saying goes. With a growing array of automation technologies, such a philosophical expression can be applied to process control and plant-wide optimization. Whether the...
Iconic-Mark_Inverted-Color

What Methods are Available for Accessing OSIsoft's PI Server?

When someone jumps into a project without thinking things through we’ll often say that he or she took the “hard way”.  While the easy way usually involves a little more thought at the start, it typically results in a faster and more satisfactory finish.  Racing...
fast track

What is Process Gain? Why is Process Gain important when tuning Processes?

Learn more about the Sensitivity Variable Professionals who tune PID controllers using manual methods tend to agree that understanding the Process Gain of their system is of the up-most importance. Among industry practitioners the Process Gain is often referred to as the “how far” or...

Still looking for more?

Now that you’ve gotten the basics, connect with our team to learn how our people, processes and technologies can help you optimize.