Operational efficiency can help your company lower production and distribution costs across multiple sectors like Energy, Manufacturing, Logistics, and more. McKinsey and Co notes that for semiconductor companies, “improving equipment reliability can help a fab enhance its tool availability (the share of time that a piece of equipment is ready to process incoming work) by more than 15 percent.” But monitoring and enhancing your equipment isn’t that simple. It requires insights into factories, IoT sensors, workers, and more—a true 360-degree view of operational analytics.
With Spotfire, leading companies have gained this insider access into operations, seeing exactly where equipment is failing and using predictive analytics to prevent future failures from happening. Check out how these global leaders increase their operational efficiency with Spotfire:
Norfolk Southern increases operational visibility
Norfolk Southern knows it has to keep trains moving to keep customers happy. It serves every major container port—and operates about 20,000 rail miles, the most extensive intermodal network in the Eastern US. Operational efficiency isn’t just a wishlist item, it’s a must.
To revolutionize performance, the team decided to rebuild its operations from the ground up. With Spotfire visual data science, Norfolk Southern leveraged planning algorithms and optimization models to improve train loading and unloading times as well as yard operations.
“Getting the right data to the right place at the right time to make the right decision, really aided in our journey,” says Director of Business Process and Systems, Jonathan Holliday. The company even has a detailed tracking model to project supply and demand—optimizing customer railcar assignments and supplying the right car at the right time for loading and unloading, making the best use of scarce assets.
The USDA Cotton Program lowers costs and maintenance
Want to go from waiting 2 days for data to 0 hours? The USDA cotton program did with Spotfire. This program grades all the cotton in the US—the faster the cotton is graded the faster it can hit the supply chain. Data lags meant it needed to digitize its system to keep up with growing demands. After implementing Spotfire, the team says it was “easy to install, easy to create visualizations that people could use, and easy to learn on the fly. With the Spotfire system, we haven’t had to work so hard to incite change.”
Increasing the speed of data consumption means the USDA cotton program can reach insights faster and make better decisions, ultimately increasing the amount of cotton that can make it to producers. “We analyze hundreds of millions of data points, several years’ worth of data, trends, and how our machines were and are now operating. We look at our finances and utility consumption, all with just a mouse click. Previously, it would have taken us days, weeks, months to analyze that data and see what we needed to change,” says Darryl Earnest, Deputy Administrator.
Siemens Mobility decreases unplanned downtime
Siemens Mobility has a goal of 100% train availability. To achieve this ambitious goal, the team deployed a robust analytics solution with Spotfire that helps anticipate failures and breakdowns. Siemens measures every train, which sometimes has 2,000 different components, with sensors on the edge. All of this data is run through Spotfire, which can report on degradation patterns and any related anomalies. If a train starts to show outliers while in transit, Siemens can schedule future maintenance without affecting travel activity.
“We use Spotfire software for advanced analytics and data cleansing, and with Railigent and Spotfire software, customers have seen a decrease in unplanned downtime by 30–50 percent,” says Gerhard Kress, Vice President, Data Services.
Want to improve your operational efficiency?
Spotfire is customizable to your unique operational needs. Whether you need to reduce defects on semiconductor wafers, lower the downtime on your machines, or increase the uptime on your oil wells, Spotfire can help.
In the Energy or Manufacturing sectors? We have unique solutions already created with your needs in mind. Check out the Spotfire Community to download pre-built templates and industry-specific accelerators.
