A Manufacturing Sustainability Story

How Fabricated Extrusion Co. improved manufacturing sustainability with DELMIAWORKS

Fabricated Extrusion Co. is a plastic extruder, manufacturing custom profile and sheet extrusions.

Since implementing DELMIAWORKS manufacturing ERP, they have been able to weave sustainability practices throughout the manufacturing process – improving productivity and profitability along the way.

Thomas Peot, Vice President at Fabricated Extrusion Co. points out that:

“We would not be where we’re sitting here today without DELMIAWORKS.”

Watch Fabricated Extrusion Company’s sustainability story:

 

“Our sustainability program is our water reclamation, it’s our energy conservation, it’s our solar energy, it’s our trim buyback program, it’s managing our granules in our system throughout our process. And DELMIAWORKS has been vital to making that a success.”

The business depends on DELMIAWORKS’ real-time production and process monitoring tools.

DELMIAWORKS has impacted every aspect of the business. Fabricated Extrusion Co. uses DELMIAWORKS throughout the business operations, in:

• Order entry
• Production scheduling
• inventory management
• Barcodes and scanning
• Shipping
• Finance.

Improving sustainability

With DELMIAWORKS, Fabricated Extrusion Co. have been able to implement a sustainability program. As well as being ‘the right thing to do’, introducing sustainability practices has brought financial benefits to the company. They’ve reduced waste, achieved greater productivity and grown profits over the last four years since implementing DELMIAWORKS.

The sustainability program is focused on a few major areas:

Water reclamation

In the past, Fabricated Extrusion Co. used millions of gallons of water per month in extrusion cooling. Now, they have been able to capture that water before it goes back out to the sewer, and reuse it. They chill and clean the water, before pumping it back into the facility to continue being used.

Trim buyback (from customers)

Fabricated Extrusion Co. has started to collect the trim scrap from customers that fabricate or process the extrusions on their end. Those scraps are brought back to the facility and reused, keeping it out of the landfill.

Solar Energy

Power is a big business cost factor for Fabricated Extrusion Co., but they are now getting about 35-40% of their power needs from the solar energy generation plants they implemented.

Cutting waste

Fabricated Extrusion Co. is now able to track granules in every step of the process.

When they are getting profiles on-size, startup and tear-down materials that would previously have gone to waste are now granulated and re-processed. They now know, to the exact pound what materials are out on the manufacturing shop floor. That knowledge of where everything is improves efficiency and profitability while producing far less waste.

DELMIAWORKS has enabled Fabricated Extrusion Co., essentially, to capture the full value of their materials. DELMIAWORKS has completely changed how people do their job. Because Fabricated Extrusion Co. uses so many different tools and runs different plastics or different colours through those same tools, their production scheduling has to be very dynamic.

By removing the guesswork from a lot of these processes, DELMIAWORKS has turned them into a data-driven business. Operators can be in constant communication on what is coming up next, which has boosted efficiency across the business by cutting down on wasted time.