Bulk handling facilities must continually work to increase throughput and achieve exacting cargo requirements. Planning for bulk commodity distribution presents unique challenges, including complex interrelated tasks and disruptions from weather changes and equipment failures. Planners work to ensure streamlined processes for product disbursement, but sometimes the performance outcome doesn’t match that plan. They are left asking unanswerable questions, such as “Is this the best process I can do?” or ‘How do I know I set a reasonable target?”
Site automation systems have revolutionized the step-by-step processing of these tasks and CTRM software manages overall operations; however, integrating these two systems to analyze performance data and provide actionable insights is a challenge. No single system is able to combine different data structures from each system, often at different levels of granularity.
Eka Software’s Operations Plan Performance (OPP) – delivered through Eka’s Commodity Analytics Cloud platform – answers those tough questions. OPP enables planners to analyze the plan and compare it to the actual result. OPP does not just collect information about past events, it also feeds current status updates of the operation while planners are setting up related tasks.
Once the plan is committed to the system, OPP tracks whether the operations were executed according to the planned activity. It sends precise actual results with the plan for system analysis, and highlights where the operation deviated from the plan. Learning from this analysis enables business experts to make higher level decisions that increase optimization levels by planning operations they know will produce the best results.
OPP provides reports and metrics. Further analysis determines what scenarios caused any shifts – giving the user the ability to optimize plans by asking for the operations they now know will produce the best results, maximizing operational productivity.
In today’s volatile and highly competitive commodity markets, understanding why a plan failed and how to improve performance is crucial to success.
