The International Group, Inc. (IGI), a privately owned wax producer, needed to improve its wax yields to remain competitive. Lityx, an AI analytics provider, offered a solution that could analyze IGI’s thousands of data points to identify opportunities for operational efficiency. With CONNECT data services, IGI and Lityx can now share crucial real-time data in a secure data warehouse in the cloud.
"We were able to reduce the wax left over after processing by 50%. Instead of throwing away 8% of our production, we were able to sell part of it and reduce waste to only 5.2% in 2021."
—Bill Sandblom, CIO, The International Group, Inc.
Goals
- Use AI-powered analytics on real-time, historical and lab data in the cloud to improve wax yields
- Give operators real-time suggestions to increase plant performance and reduce waste
- Replace a proprietary software with a more scalable and efficient solution
Challenges
- Operator behavior varied widely, leading to different results on each shift
- The existing solution could not offer proactive suggestions for changes that could optimize performance
Solution
Results
- IGI reduced crude waste by 49% and eliminated 20 hours of off-specification processing every two weeks
- Higher yields generated $10M in profit over a single year
- The project resulted in an initial 67x ROI, with cumulative returns over time
