Excel Industries, a leading outdoor power equipment manufacturer, was facing a significant challenge with their parts lookup and ordering system. The company was dependent on a third-party provider to make changes to their parts books and manuals, which was a time-consuming process that often took five to six months to implement. This delay resulted in dealers and distributors being unsure if they were ordering the right part or accessory, damaging the trust between the company and their network. The inaccurate parts data also began impacting Excel’s costs and bottom line, with one instance of a mislabeled transmission resulting in significant shipping costs and a 30-day delay to fix the error.

Before the implementation of Documoto, Paladin Attachments had a manual and time-consuming process for parts ordering and customer service. Customers had to call in to order parts and consumables, and the company relied on hard copy manuals and PDF catalogs for parts lookup. These documents were not regularly updated or maintained, leading to issues with part supersessions. Updates to these documents could take anywhere from 4-12 hours, and creating a new parts manual could take weeks. The company wanted to modernize its aftermarket sales and develop a better way of doing business online.

Atlas Copco Construction (ACC) is a global manufacturer of construction equipment with a geographically dispersed customer base. The company was facing challenges with its parts lookup and ordering system. The traditional, printed parts catalogs were becoming obsolete and were unable to keep up with the real-time updates. This was causing delays in the ordering process and was affecting the company's relationship with its customers. ACC needed a solution that would deliver updated versions of documents to their network immediately. The company wanted a dynamic system, which would not only display current inventory levels, but also provide customers with information regarding how products should be used. The goal was to make speed and accuracy a competitive differentiator, with product updates, technical information, and pricing available to end users as close to real-time as possible.

LA Metro, the operator of a system with 2,200 buses and over 270 rail cars, had an inefficient and outdated parts lookup and ordering system. Mechanics diagnosed vehicle problems, then created a parts list by viewing PDFs and manually writing down part numbers. Then they would open the EAM portal and enter the part numbers to create an order. However, obtaining accurate part information from manufacturers' PDFs remained slow and tedious, and submitting an incorrect part number could result in lengthy delays. One of the major sources of staff and vehicle downtime is order accuracy. Before implementing the new solution, technicians ordered an incorrect part on 25% of orders. Re-ordering the correct part involves at least a 30-minute delay before the right part arrives back at the service bay. With 2,000 mechanics losing a half hour of work on 25% of their jobs, fixing this problem was a major goal of Metro's maintenance division.

As Hiperbaric expanded its product base, they realized that their customer satisfaction goals required a more robust content solution for technical support. They needed a system where spare part information, service bulletins, and other technical documentation could be easily accessed by internal staff and machine owners. Traditional parts manuals were created and formatted using desktop publishing tools in a repetitive, mostly manual process. However, constant changes in parts information created a roadblock for time and efficiency, as each instance had to be manually updated and then redistributed in a timely fashion. Hiperbaric wanted to provide quick and accurate after-sales service, as even a brief stoppage in operation can shut down a food manufacturer’s production line and cause unacceptable impacts on output.

Viking Range, LLC, a pioneer in bringing commercial-quality technology and design to the residential market, needed an online solution to provide comprehensive product information in one location for both service people and consumers. The documentation includes use and care instructions, installation guides, service manuals and bulletins, and parts books. Viking was also motivated to increase efficiencies in their publishing department. Their previous system relied on an outside vendor to update the content via static PDFs and spreadsheet files. The process of updating a parts book took up to two weeks before it was available online because Viking had to send the change to the external service provider and wait for them to get the content updated on Viking’s online system.

Fecon, a manufacturer of premium products in the forestry industry, was facing challenges with its parts catalogs. The catalogs were dependent on a third-party vendor, who converted product information from the manufacturer into parts books and manuals. This process was time-consuming and costly, with each manual costing almost $10,000. The lengthy turnaround time meant parts catalogs were effectively obsolete as soon as they were published. There was no effective way to update manuals in response to engineering changes and product updates. This resulted in extensive phone time with Fecon customer service simply trying to identify the correct parts for a customer’s machine. Fecon wanted to improve dealer and customer communications by providing timely service bulletins, warranty notifications, sales promotions and other vital information for equipment owners.

Dragotec’s equipment is known for its durability, a necessity in agricultural working environments. However, the harsh conditions sometimes experienced during crop harvesting can lead to equipment damage. When this happens, dealers and equipment owners need product documentation that easily distinguishes what part requires repair or replacement. The challenge was ensuring that the manuals accurately depict the equipment parts. The printed books provided with their corn head attachments did not drill down into every part of the attachment, making illustrations with part numbers and specifications difficult to create and maintain. The outdated parts books were hard to read, making it difficult to provide sales and service support to dealers. The features they sought out in a solution were ease of use, improved publishing processes, improved publishing release timeframe, easy adoption rate with network, and enhanced dealer experience.

Oxbo International, a part of the Ploeger Oxbo Group, develops, manufactures, distributes, and supports mechanized solutions for agricultural niche markets worldwide. With several facilities and sister companies in Europe, the Ploeger Oxbo Group needed a solution to unify and host product information. The first challenge was finding a solution that could help them create and publish parts catalogs efficiently. The second was finding a solution that could connect to their fragmented technical documentation. Previous processes would take months to complete, making it challenging to provide sales and service support to the equipment owners seeking guidance on their machines.

Schramm, a manufacturer and global supplier to the hydraulic drilling industry, was facing challenges with their parts book processes. The company was producing generic parts books that were not customized to the customers' rigs. The process of creating these books was lengthy and time-consuming. Some illustrations were hand-drawn, out of date, or incorrect. If there were any engineering changes, they could not be easily added to the parts books in the field. This led to inefficiencies and difficulties in providing accurate and up-to-date information to their customers. The company needed a solution that could improve their publishing process, automate parts book publishing, and provide secure online access to parts information for their global network of customers and dealers.

MacLean, a company that designs, manufactures, and supports engineered solutions across the mining, municipal, and waste management sectors, faced challenges in unifying internal and external documentation. They needed a solution that could help them create and publish parts catalogs efficiently and improve their aftermarket customer experience by connecting their customers to their machine technical documentation. The previous processes were time-consuming and would take weeks to complete. They also lacked shopping cart capability for their customers.

ComfortFit Labs, a New Jersey-based packaging manufacturer that designs and manufactures custom orthotics, was facing a challenge with their traditional order processing workflow. The process was tedious, involving significant manual labor and long turnaround times. Customers would send plaster casts of their patients’ limbs along with paper order forms to ComfortFit. The order data was recorded manually, and when a work order was issued to the floor, technicians had to manually measure the cast and find the right mold out of hundreds to manufacture from. This resulted in an average 7–20 day turnaround time with a process that was prone to human error from order entry.

Arnold Packaging, a comprehensive supplier to the packaging industry, faced a significant challenge in their production process. Their process started with the collection of custom specs for an order and communicating them to the production floor. Technicians then worked together to complete various tasks in a workflow before the deliver-by date. However, activity was recorded manually on time sheets, which meant managers lacked real-time visibility on their operations. The company had a tedious, manual process of understanding data that couldn’t keep up with the pace of the production floor. Arnold Packaging needed a solution that would provide advanced production visibility, so that they could enhance technician productivity and gain significant managerial time savings.

HT Micron, a semiconductor facility in São Leopoldo Brazil, needed to implement a manufacturing execution system (MES) within two months to meet the demands of Tier 1 international customers. The company was starting up in a country with no industry experience and no MES consultants with semiconductor experience. The MES was critical for the company to get on the approved vendor list of global Tier 1 customers and to stay efficient and flexible as their volume and product mix grow. The company also faced the challenge of training every employee and getting to market rapidly.

SMART Modular Technologies’ 10-year-old memory chip back-end plant in Brazil was stepping up to implement a modern comprehensive manufacturing execution system (MES). The timing was to succeed as a second source for a new product and more to come. As SMART continued its thrust into the mobile market for memory, they recognized that the current controls would no longer suffice. The plant was using an internally-developed WIP tracking system plus Excel and paper. This system did not provide close yield monitoring. SMART could not easily analyze data to prevent defects. Lot traceability was a manual and tedious task, and operators had to choose the right tools and recipe. With new products and more volume, this would not be sufficient. So in 2013, the Atibaia IC facility began looking for a system that would do far more than its current software.

GS-EPI, a provider of professional silicon epitaxial wafer (Epi) OEM services, was facing a growing challenge. The company manufactures more than 200,000 6” EPI wafers per month on three types of equipment and the volume was growing. Historically, GS-EPI collected production data, recorded it on paper and put it into Excel spreadsheets. Querying production data was very difficult and in some cases, it was impossible to find the correct set of data from the past. To win customers, GS-EPI has to explain how they manage the production process, how they control quality and how they achieve wafer traceability. Their critical customers demanded that they implement an MES system. At the same time, managers knew that they needed a tool to help manage production efficiently to meet the increasing number of orders they were getting.

AT&S, a leader in the high-end printed circuit board (PCB) market, was building a new plant in China to manufacture integrated circuit (IC) substrates. They recognized that their new substrate production facility would need effective automated information flows to handle all of the data for their products. The systems in place in their six existing PCB production facilities were not adequate. These systems presented two related business challenges: efficiency of data collection and access to data about products and processes, and changing traceability requirements that require agility to revamp information sets. The current application set also presented some IT challenges. Other AT&S plants had an array of systems providing MES capabilities. These included commercial applications from the ERP provider, some applications developed on IBM Notes and homegrown software.

The company, one of the world's largest providers of semiconductor manufacturing assembly and test services, was facing challenges in tracking, monitoring, and optimizing the utilization of its several thousand processing equipment in its high-volume manufacturing site in China. The main requirements were to capture equipment status and historical information automatically for real-time knowledge and performance analysis over time, and to visualize the status of all the equipment in real-time in a graphical manner representing the actual physical fab layout. The large scale of the operation necessitated a solution that was scalable, flexible, and had state-of-the-art visualization and reporting capabilities.

Hitachi Zosen Corporation, a Japan-based EPC, is committed to creating innovative products that are beneficial to society and technology. To stay competitive, the company needs to ensure that each product is not only innovative but also allows their clients to maintain a competitive edge with traditional products and other emerging technologies. One of the challenges the company faced was developing a zeolite membrane alternative to traditional ethanol dehydration. The removal of excess water from ethanol is an expensive and time-consuming step that limits ethanol competitiveness in the energy market. To be added to gasoline, a mixture needs to be at least 99.5% ethanol. With an azeotrope that limits water removal from mixtures to 95% ethanol, a cheap and effective means of reaching higher ethanol content is currently in high demand.

The company faced process and mechanical events at one of its wood products processing plants that had created product quality and throughput interruptions, causing product losses. The challenge was to identify and prevent these events to avoid operational shutdowns and maintain product quality.

Reliance Industries Limited, an Indian conglomerate holding company, faced a challenge with their toluene separation process. The existing benzene separation column was underperforming, with the benzene content in the bottoms being higher than the required 200 ppm. This resulted in an unsuccessful planned revamp for benzene-toluene separation. The vendor was unable to offer a viable solution to the underperforming column, stating the column was too tightly designed resulting in offsite processing of the benzene column bottoms containing toluene and heavies. Following the shutdown of the offsite processing facility, the revamp for benzene-toluene became essential. Because of heavy losses due to the lack of a local toluene separation facility, an urgent revamp became critical.

DeNovo, an independent upstream operating company based in Trinidad and Tobago, was seeking to leverage the best technology commercially available to run optimized operations that support innovation, enhanced workflows, and industrial efficiency. The company manages complex operations with a wide range of risk profiles and needed to be agile and highly efficient to remain safe, competitive, and profitable. Operating inefficiencies could account for as much as 25% loss in production output and up to a 40% increase in energy and operational costs.

The customer, a diversified energy company with operations in refining, marketing, midstream, chemicals and specialties, had experienced three previous failures of a hydrogen compressor resulting in millions in production losses and additional maintenance costs. The company had begun its own digital transformation initiative that uses big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to drive cultural change in the organization. As part of the initiative, they were investigating predictive maintenance. The customer decided to organize a competitive bakeoff, trimming an initial list of ten predictive analytics vendors to a handful of finalists. Ultimately, AspenTech was chosen as the sole vendor to execute an online pilot project.

Braskem, a major player in the international petrochemical market, was facing challenges with variability in product quality, high energy usage, and excess reflux in their operations. The company had around 210 AspenTech advanced process control (APC) controllers installed among four Brazilian cracker sites. However, up until 2015, advanced process control was only installed on furnaces. The lack of an optimization algorithm on distillation columns resulted in lost potential benefits and unnecessary excess spending. There were frequent composition peaks and an excess of reflux, meaning excess utility spent on refrigeration compressors that use high pressure steam. Braskem decided to implement an optimization strategy using Aspen DMC3 to improve product quality and reduce project costs.

One of the world’s largest fully integrated zinc and lead smelting and refining complexes wanted to improve their metallurgical operations. The team recognized they had an opportunity to improve preventative maintenance by using information from their process signal historian. In addition, they wanted a solution that could help as the company developed a comprehensive approach to strengthen environmental, employee and community safeguards. The operations group’s reliability team needed a technology to track, detect and prevent equipment failures.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a global healthcare company, was facing challenges with its batch production record and associated workflows. The company was dealing with a massive volume of business, with multiple packaging lines handling upwards of 10,000 batches per year, each batch record including over 1,000 manual entries. This resulted in over 10 million manual record entries per year. The preparation and review time for each batch was 10 days. GSK wanted to review the structure of its batch production record and associated workflows as part of a continuous improvement process. The goal was to reduce batch review time, which would result in faster batch cycle time, higher throughput at the production facility, and faster cash-to-cash cycle time.

Organizations are hamstrung by traditional estimating methods. The challenge is to move to the model-based Aspen Capital Cost Estimator (ACCE) approach while smoothly and simultaneously improving consistency and accuracy of ongoing cost estimates, bid responses, and lump sum proposal development. Most business leaders, project directors, and bid managers know that they are hamstrung by traditional estimating methods. The challenge is to move to the model-based Aspen Capital Cost Estimator (ACCE) approach while smoothly and simultaneously improving on the consistency and accuracy of the ongoing estimates.

YPFB, the national oil company in Bolivia, was experiencing a significant decline in production in two of its major gas fields, San Antonio and San Alberto. The fields were operating at full capacity to meet market demands, while projects for well compression were still under development. The company needed to increase production to meet the growing demand for natural gas in South America, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Additionally, YPFB had to maintain regulatory compliance while covering the internal market.

Chevron, a global energy company, faces challenges in maintaining and maximizing APC applications. After a unit turnaround, which involves maintenance, modification, overhaul, inspection, testing, and replacement of process materials and equipment, it is often difficult to return a controller to service without significant rework. The traditional process of managing plant step tests, collecting and cleaning data, and creating and evaluating the model is manual and time-consuming. With many controllers to support and a scarcity of engineering resources, Chevron faces a growing challenge in maintaining APC applications.

The mining company was seeking a step change in how to proactively handle reliability issues for critical equipment. Previous efforts with solutions like Smart Signal had not provided the benefits they were seeking. The company was interested in Aspen Mtell and visited an installation in Botswana to see it in action. They decided to conduct an online pilot which would provide a faster time to value.