With four major sites each delivering millions of tons of cement a year, Bestway Cement runs energy-intensive, complex industrial processes. From goods inwards to customer deliveries, operational efficiency is an absolute priority, to help the company achieve improved quality, enhanced profitability, and reduced environmental footprint.
Built in part through acquisition, Bestway Cement relied on multiple, separate solutions to run the business. In this situation, from raw materials to final product, managers were unable to obtain timely, accurate data for analysis, impacting their ability to identify opportunities for efficiency improvements.
For example, as trucks enter and leave each site they pass onto weighbridges to determine the exact loads, which is a critical piece of data. Extracting the information (e.g. truck identity, materials item, load weight, time, date) and matching it to finances and production was an error-prone process, and by the time results were generated a week or more later, opportunities to rectify discrepancies were long gone.
Junaid Nasir, Head of Information Technology Department, explains, “Extracting information was largely manual, which introduced an element of human error. Managers were sent printed reports, often based on poor quality input data, that ran to hundreds of pages, all delivered two or three weeks after the event. Similarly, on the finance side, the general ledger, payroll, and accounts payables systems ran on individual systems, and month-end closing could take up to three weeks.”
He continues, “In a commodity sector such as cement, operational capability is the central lever to enhance profitability. At the same time, when running a business with very high energy consumption, efficiency also makes a direct contribution to reducing environmental impact. With these twin imperatives, Bestway Cement looked for ways to improve performance by providing real-time data to executives, helping us to cut waste and grow the business, even as we improve our green credentials.”