KDS Software Reveals New Insights to Make Plastics More Sustainable With Pentaho

Challenge

Facilitating Data-Driven Decisions

Kirchhoff Datensysteme Software GmbH & Co. KG (KDS Software) is a leading European provider of business software applications for plastics compounders and recyclers, which enables its clients to manage one million metric tons of annual production volume through its solutions.

Christopher Brendel, Managing Director at KDS Software says: “The plastics manufacturing industry needs to adapt to increasing sustainability requirements around the world, higher prices for resources such as crude oil, and rising energy prices, especially in Europe. As a result, efficient processes for plastics compounding and recompounding are becoming important for nearly all of our clients. We wanted to expand the operational and analytical features of our Poly.ERP and Poly.MES solutions to support more sustainable plastics production.”

KDS Software identified the need for a comprehensive data analytics tool that would empower customers to gain a deeper understanding of their operations and boost efficiency. For this new tool, the idea was to cover every area of analytics, from data consolidation and transformation to advanced analytics reports and real-time dashboards for data-driven decision-making to improve bottom-line results in profitability and sustainability.

Outcome

Increasing Productivity and Strengthening Competitiveness

Thanks to KDS Software’s partnership with Hitachi, Poly.MIS customers can access advanced analytics features that integrate seamlessly with the look and feel of the Poly.ERP solution.

“By working with Hitachi, we can offer integrated data analytics features cost-efficiently,” says Christopher Brendel. “With our deep industry expertise, we can build standard reports that customers can use out of the box. By delivering key metrics directly to decision-makers’ inboxes, we can reduce time to insight by 85% compared to manual analytics with spreadsheets. And we can provide our customers with more than 100 scheduled reports to help them optimize daily operations without delays.”

KDS Software and its customers also value the flexibility of new ad-hoc reporting capabilities. By making data more accessible, business users can answer questions for themselves with self-service analytics tools. As a result, Poly.MIS customers create on average about 130 new reports every year. This clearly shows that they rely less on IT support and can respond much faster to business challenges.

“The embedded Hitachi solution empowers our users to dive deep into their business data,” notes Christopher Brendel. “Plastics manufacturers can easily visualize their key performance metrics in many different ways, spot patterns, increase efficiency, improve sustainability, and unlock competitive advantages.”

As a next step, KDS Software wants to expand its data dashboards. The company plans to build on Hitachi software to visualize the capacity increases that customers can achieve with more efficient planning.

“We are developing new planning algorithms to help our customers boost their production volumes to encourage more sustainable operations with less waste of resources,” says Christopher Brendel. “In our pilot project we have seen that we can increase capacities by up to 20% with smarter planning. It is crucial for us to be able to highlight such gains to our customers using attractive graphics and charts.”

With factories becoming more closely interconnected, KDS Software aims to integrate Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data into its analytics platform.

“We see huge potential for our customers to optimize their operations with machine data and real-time dashboards,” explains Christopher Brendel. “As a business, we want to be part of that. Our goal is to grow and increasingly connect to existing third-party ERP and production systems.”

Finally, to manage the larger data volumes coming from production equipment and sensors, KDS Software is now considering taking advantage of the Lumada Industrial DataOps suite.

Christopher Brendel concludes: “Many of our customers could do much more with their data. Through our partnership with Hitachi, we can make business processes easier to understand, helping our customers increase their sustainability and competitiveness. We want to build on our success and extend Poly.MIS further by taking full advantage of Hitachi analytics solutions.”