Golden Grain Energy Leverages Plant Process Management (PPM) System

Application

Ethanol and livestock feed producer unlocks the limitless use cases for the eschbach Shiftconnector® solution to optimize workflows and achieve additional ROI.

Customer

Golden Grain Energy, LLC is an energy supplies management company based in Mason City, Iowa. It focuses on northern Iowa’s corn production by turning locally grown corn into clean-burning ethanol (approximately 130 million gallons annually).The company also produces DCO (distiller’s corn oil), both wet and dry distiller grains, providing a feed source for local livestock producers.

Challenge

Golden Grain Energy deployed Shiftconnector, a Plant Process Management (PPM) system, that has proven to be a critical and necessary complement to their plant PLC/DCS investment for digitizing manual workflow inclusive of shift logs and shift handover.Over time, the company recognized the opportunity to use the Shiftconnector SaaS solution to better track incoming and outgoing products, grains inventory, and bypass events with the expectation that key information could be easily viewed, analyzed, and shared.

Solution

Knowing that the Shiftconnector enterprise platform is an enabler for digital transformation addressing an unlimited number of use cases, Golden Grain Energy enlisted assistance from Adatafy, a Shiftconnector Solution Partner, to deploy solutions that would help them achieve new levels of performance.

Following an initial discovery session and configuration workshop, the project commenced using Agile sprint methodology for application development.
An Adatafy Software Engineer created custom data fields, logical forms, and dashboards to meet Golden Grain’s specifications for electronically tracking workflow and data for:

Incoming and outgoing products, transportation method, dates, bill of lading, and vendors
Grains inventory
Safety and process Bypasses
Plant events and announcements

Outcome

By tailoring Shiftconnector fields to capture and display data relevant to their specific operational needs, Golden Grain Energy has realized additional return on investment by removing inefficiencies, connecting their teams, and transforming data into actionable insights.

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