More Sustainability, Consistent Quality: How to Successfully Process PCR Plastics

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024 at 9 AM ET | 3 PM CET

Key role

Head of Production

Overseeing the entire shop floor process, the head of production plays a central role in maintaining overall output integrity. Ultimately, you are responsible for ensuring all strategic operational goals are met, while delivering a high standard of production quality.

Overseeing the entire shop floor process, the head of production plays a central role in maintaining overall output integrity. Ultimately, you are responsible for ensuring all strategic operational goals are met, while delivering a high standard of production quality. By investing in dynamic processes and moderating plastic production costs, heads of production can reach their business targets.

Both maximizing efficiency levels and optimizing production levels represent a major part of your job. Hence, the role requires an economically motivated person who successfully leans into high plastic production cost and efficiency pressure. Under these circumstances, sensXPERT is the perfect solution. By leveraging real-time data and dynamic processes within your manufacturing environments, sensXPERT can help you achieve all your production goals more quickly and effortlessly.

sensXPERT features designed for you

FEATURE 01

Dynamic Processes

Real-time material characterization and advanced data analytics are central to the sensXPERT solution. Large sets of valuable real-time data are combined with existing kinetic models and the power of AI to help predict material deviations like never before. Equipped with this extraordinary knowledge, you can now control your process in a truly dynamic and adaptive way. Tap into uniquely powerful benefits such as real-time quality control, improved energy efficiency, and a more sustainable supply chain.

FEATURE 02

Process Tracking

sensXPERT is continuously accumulating process data from its own in-mold dielectric sensors, including data from any other built-in third-party sensors and data from the mold machine itself. It intelligently processes this vast amount of information with existing kinetic models to build a holistic view of what’s happening inside your mold…and in real-time! Unlike other existing methods, this new-found transparency allows you to track and control the quality of each manufactured part. Thereby reducing the plastic production costs and resources needed for post-process testing.

FEATURE 03

Holistic Production Transparency

Thanks to the sensXPERT Digital Cloud Service, complete oversight across all your manufacturing locations is now a genuinely viable possibility. However, this goes beyond just simple performance or quality reporting. Whether your setup transmits digital and/or analog signals, sensXPERT offers an intelligent service that breaks down silos and offers you invaluable, actionable insights based on a holistic view of all your production data (it is also OPC-UA compliant). Crucially, you can compare, correlate, and evaluate manufacturing and production data across all your product lines, via a single, unified portal.

Understanding the challenges you face

sensXPERT is designed to target a vast array of challenges in the plastics manufacturing industry. However, let’s focus on the pain points that you may recognize in your day-to-day work environment:

CHALLENGE 01

A strain on cost efficiency

Despite the steady rise in labor, raw material, energy, and general plastic production costs, you are still expected to deliver and maintain a cost-efficient production process. Add unfavorably high scrap production rates and overly long cycle times to the equation, and it’s no surprise that your margins are steadily tightening.

CHALLENGE 02

Increasing sustainability obligations

The environmental impact of plastics manufacturing and associated sustainability targets are hugely important issues that every business must factor into their operations. Part of this responsibility falls on your shoulders, including some of the regulatory scrutiny that comes with it.

Whether it’s keeping your business’s carbon footprint low, ensuring a longer product life, or disclosing your sustainability records to EU regulators (under the EU Green Deal and EU Taxonomy), it all adds to the pressure.

CHALLENGE 03

Lack of skilled workforce

The current labor market is undergoing huge changes. Some would even say that these changes are unprecedented. This includes a vast, aging workforce that will soon retire, taking with them the skills they’ve acquired over a lifetime.

However, finding and recruiting replacements is not as clear-cut as identifying individuals with new relevant industry skills e.g., data management and analysis. There is also the need to consider the institutional experience, intuition, and knowledge specific to the role you’re replacing.

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Top benefits worth considering

BENEFIT 01

Increased efficiency

sensXPERT can help you reduce cycle times across the board, by accurately predicting each cycle’s optimum degree of cure or crystallization. This not only helps you maintain a highly effective production program but also gives your ROI a massive boost. Consequently, it also keeps the amortization rate relatively low. Combining this with other measurable savings and benefits, such as waste reduction, improved labor utilization, and lower energy costs, only adds to an already exceptional rate of efficiency and sustainability.

BENEFIT 02

A single source of truth

Significantly, sensXPERT is specifically designed to centralize and streamline your workflow. It is a comprehensive portal, serving as a single point for managing all your different production processes. Whether you're making decisions related to process optimization, waste minimization, or enhancing economic efficiency, all the necessary data is readily accessible. Furthermore, it also integrates data from third-party sources directly, putting all the information you need right at your fingertips.

BENEFIT 03

An empowered workforce

By harnessing the incredible potential of real-time data and AI, sensXPERT becomes a powerful tool for helping your workforce achieve optimum productivity (especially those with limited industry experience). sensXPERT helps them achieve what was once humanly impossible, namely leveraging vast amounts of data to make accurate decisions around dynamic process control. More importantly, sensXPERT’s interface has been designed to be easy to use and requires low effort in terms of setting it up.

BENEFIT 04

Improved sustainability

Achieving your business’ sustainability goals is a lot easier with the help of sensXPERT. Firstly, helping you reduce scrap production means less raw material is wasted on defective parts. Secondly, sensXPERT will considerably shorten your cycle times, resulting in lower energy consumption. Finally, a highly optimized manufacturing process means fewer human resources are required for troubleshooting.

Explore real-world use cases for sensXPERT

Improving in-mold transparency in the electrical encapsulation industry

Find out how two companies successfully used sensXPERT on their reaction injection molding processes to boost in-mold transparency and reduce scrap production rates.

Find out more

Discover the true potential of sensXPERT for yourself

Speak to one of our sensXPERTs and find out how your manufacturing business can achieve the impossible.

Get in touch

Additional Relevant Resources