Continuous Benchmarking with Seeq: Unlocking Competitive Advantage

Industry benchmarking, or competitive benchmarking studies, is common amongst many large processing and manufacturing companies. These studies often provide valuable insights and information on a plant’s emission levels, reliability and maintenance spend, staffing, margins, and yield, as well as overall operating expense. With this information, companies can determine their operational performance compared to their peers and gain valuable information on where to focus for future improvements or process changes. Benchmarking typically occurs every two years, resulting in a report that informs how an organization’s operations compare with top and bottom performers in the industry.  

With competition and regulations ever-evolving, it is crucial for companies to spend their limited budgets on projects that drive the most value for their business. For companies that have multiple facilities, it also serves to compare performance and flexibility amongst different sites. Industry benchmarking is one of the most common methods for corporations to gather information to plan for future investments. 

The Challenge

With all the benefits industry benchmarking provides, one may question why companies don’t conduct these studies more often. Fairly evaluating and comparing companies and processes is not as trivial as it may sound due to the complexities of the data. The KPIs used to compare companies in industry benchmarking need to be agnostic of equipment or process size and layout but detailed enough to represent the true comparative performance of the process. Additionally, the KPIs are based on normal steady-state operation, so data cleansing is required to achieve the final data needed for upload. 

In the past, engineers would perform manual data pulls from a combination of data sources to begin compiling the necessary data for these studies. Once the data has been pulled, the manual cleansing process begins. This includes defining parameters for the unit that represents steady state and manually deleting out any rows that wouldn’t be representative of the study. Process engineering teams complete this process for many variables on each unit, often leading to a week or more of manual cleansing to get the data set for upload just right.  This process then must be manually completed every few years. Due to rapid role changes in engineering, it’s rare that the same engineer completes the task in the following cycle.  This leads to lost time trying to understand exactly what parameters were pulled and how the cleansing was performed due to the lack of collaboration abilities in traditional tools like Excel.   

Industry Benchmarking with Seeq

Fast forward to today, the Seeq platform has paved the way for organizations to continuously update industry benchmarking KPIs and evaluate performance. With the ability to pull data from many sources and conditionally cleanse it, it is now possible to set up KPIs just once to receive continuous results (Figure 1).

By automating the data curation and cleansing process, teams now receive months of valuable time back to work on improving their performance (Figure 2).  Companies are not only empowered to make process improvements but can also track the results and cumulative benefits without having to wait until the next study to verify the benefits of their investments. The collaboration tools in Seeq also enable teams to document their methodology, while capsule technology makes it easy to see exactly how data cleansing was performed. This means the next engineer can simply update the dates of the analysis and verify the previous assumptions are still accurate to complete the task.    

Another benefit of utilizing a modern solution for benchmarking is the ability for companies with multiple assets to easily perform comparisons between all their facilities. This fosters an environment of best practice sharing across companies to make improvements to key metrics, such as energy consumption. When several similar assets or units are present, scaling these calculations is made easy through Seeq’s asset capabilities. Figure 3 shows an example of a dashboard of four similar units. With continuous KPIs, additional stats such as monthly aggregates and roll-up calculations can be calculated. The ability to compare performance against both competitors and peers within your own company unlocks information about best-in-class operations and how facilities can modify their operations to improve their rankings. 

Get Started

With Seeq, a task that engineers once dreaded is now automated and provides valuable insights into their operations. With these insights, detailed improvement plans and tracking can be implemented to close the gap with competitors producing the same product, leading to a margin increase. Continuous improvement of key metrics is now more possible than ever before. What are you waiting on?  

If you are ready to discuss how Seeq can help improve your operations, please contact us to speak with one of our industry experts and schedule a demo today.