Computers & Software
today, a tremendous amount of material that used to end up as landfill gets reused or recycled.” The list of useful by-products Walter’s team culled from
Building Innovations’ processes is impressive. For example, Corian scraps turned out to have great utility.
in concrete. Tyvek wrap and flashing trim is recycled into first-grade material. Shipping pallets are repaired, reused, or ground into animal bedding. Carrier belt film is melted and used to make adhesives. Even cafeteria waste from Building Innovations facilities is recycled into worm bedding or converted into energy. But this project yielded financial as well as environmental
benefits. Amazingly, the team achieved its mission with no capital expenditures. And in just one year, Building Innovations earned $2.2 million from the sale of by-products globally, in addition to realizing $400,000 in cost savings. DuPont Building Innovations received the first-ever Supplier
Sustainability Award from the US Restaurant Development group at McDonald’s for its zero-landfill achievement. And the Building Innovations marketing team is finding ways to boost sales by leveraging the business’s commitment to sustainability among environmentally-conscious consumers. Now that the project team has accomplished its zero-
Fig 3. Reducing the amount of landfill generated to zero is not an easy task but this was achived by a Sigma Six project team.
“We trim each sheet we make, so there’s natural waste that was coming from this process,” Walter says. “There is also transition material that is created as we change from one colour of material to the next. Now, instead of putting them into a landfill, we can grind up many of our scrap sheets to reuse in our first-grade product. We also can crush the remaining scraps for use as drainage rock.” And the list continues. Sanding waste from the Corian and Zodiaq manufacturing processes is used as a filler replacement
landfill goal, it continues to use Minitab for data analysis. “Minitab is important in our auditing process,” Walter says. “Every week we’re checking our numbers, making sure the right materials are going into the right containers, and we use Minitab control charts, histograms, and other tools to make sense of the data we collect. Minitab is very powerful and easy to use, and when you have questions about the ins and outs of a particular analysis or method, the clarity Minitab provides us with is really very helpful.” But, Walter points out, one indicator of the team’s success
can be easily detected even without Minitab Statistical Software: “We no longer see any trucks coming into our plants to pick up landfill waste,” he says. l
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Eston Martz is with Minitab Inc, State College, PA, USA.
www.minitab.com
Competitiveness raises need for computers
more automated, increasingly deploying intelligent devices to monitor and control unmanned facilities. As competition has intensified across all industries, companies need to increase their process efficiency, quality and productivity. Key factors to establishing successful automation systems include faster and more reliable networking solutions, such as industrial computers. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan,
O
Analysis of the Global Industrial Computers Market, finds that the global industrial computers market earned revenues of $2134.4 million in 2011 and estimates this to reach $3,216.6 million in 2015. “Currently, competition has intensified across all industries, leading companies to
10
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wing to the rapid growth of computer and communication technology, manufacturing areas are becoming
increase their process efficiency, quality and productivity, and thus raising the need for industrial computers, notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Katarzyna Owczarczyk. While competition is intensifying at
a global level, and computer technology is striving forward at an increasing rate, most companies prefer to make immediate and maximum profits by using the latest technologies available. This is creating a need to expedite the decision-making process for investments into the industrial computers market, as companies aim to refresh and update their processes with modern technology to remain competitive. The industrial computers market has
been thriving in the Far East - especially in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. These countries have been producing industrial computers, exporting them at extremely
low prices. As their quality matches the expectations of the western market, the continued increase in competition from the Far East has put pressure on the established European market players. European and American industrial
computers suppliers are therefore forced to keep their prices down in order to compete, which may be difficult to achieve due to higher production costs. This in turn puts pressure on industrial computers manufacturers to drive down prices, as customers will be seeking to reduce their own costs. The impact of this restraint remains strong in the short and medium terms, as many end users – especially in the Asian and Eastern European countries – will prefer low cost industrial computers. l
For more information, visit
www.frost.com
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