Managing Chemical Use and Providing a Value Added Service

IPMS provides a high level of customisation. Users can brand the pages to their own design including logos and individual colour schemes. These features have been used for both internal company projects and for final customer systems where the IPMS web site has been incorporated into the company's own web site.

Objective

A Speciality Chemical company wanted to provide a value added service to its customers. They asked Meniscus to set up IPMS so that clients could view consumption trends, benchmark graphs, and process information about their products being handled by the Chemical company. The IPMS site needed to allow the company to control access to the information and to incorporate the IPMS pages into the company's own web site so that it looked like an integrated application.

Data Entry

No additional metering was required for the project. The IPMS meter system allowed the existing raw data to be input directly into the calculation engine. This data was mainly exported from the site SCADA system and then sent by FTP to Meniscus on a daily basis. Some analytical data was entered directly onto spreadsheets which were then emailed to meniscus for automatic data reading and some further data was entered directly via the web site interface.

Implementation

An initial site was set up to develop the system. A variety of technical processes were identified and coded together with the parameters required to both monitor and derive chemical use and process performance. The IPMS web pages were then re-branded to include the Chemical company's corporate logo and colour scheme and linked into the main site structure.

Once this model was complete it was simply copied using the Meniscus PC client application to quickly build individual sites for each of the final customers.

Outcome

The Chemical company is now able to add, edit and control access to a wide range of customer IPMS sites, all working from within the main company web site. Customers can view the performance of their processes and compare these with the benchmark targets set. This lets both them and the Chemical company check that their manufacturing set up is running at the optimal performance level.

By opening up the process information to customers and providing them with easy to use and understand reports and graphs the Chemical company has built confidence in its operations to help secure and increase business.