Less waste, more yield – beautifying the environment with precise machine data
Clemens Hensen
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Jul 9, 2025
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4
Minutes read
A German specialty plastic manufacturer with over 10 global production sites has a clear goal: 50% less CO₂ emissions in a few years. Every unnecessary meter of film makes this goal harder to achieve — as scrap costs raw materials, time, and money.
What to do if something goes wrong on the line — and the only option so far has been to scrap the entire batch?
Scrap in the production of high-performance and sustainable packaging
Blown film extrusion lines operate fast, continuous processes that are absolutely critical to meeting daily targets.
Normally, any anomaly on the line—especially regarding throughput—is a warning signal. And without precise data, the only safe but costly solution is to sort out the entire batch to avoid downstream quality issues and complaints.
Exactly this would have happened again with this specialty plastic manufacturer from Germany.
The line speed suddenly dropped for about a minute to 50% of the set value before recovering.
“A brief outage like this? Normally, we would have disposed of the entire roll – better safe than sorry. But that would have meant hundreds of kilos of material and many hours of work.”
— Head of Operational Excellence, Plastic Manufacturer
Targeted reduction of scrap with real-time machine data
Thanks to the ENLYZE Manufacturing Data Platform, the team had access to clean, structured machine data—collected directly from the plant, time-stamped accurately, and linked to the product and order number.
Thus, they could during the incident:
Identify the exact start and end point of the throughput drop
Precisely identify the faulty section
Sort out only that meter and continue processing the remaining batch
The result: Immediately measurable savings
The reduction of the scrap rate is the central metric—and the first successes are already visible after just a few weeks:
Less scrap
Significant savings in material and labor
Less planning effort
Lower CO₂ footprint
“No emergency reorder. No tense coordination with planning. Just a clean cut, a few meters discarded, and the rest of the batch is released for shipping.”
— Head of Operational Excellence, Plastic Manufacturer
The solution is scalable: Every extrusion line can work with the ENLYZE Manufacturing Data Platform. And the Head of Operational Excellence sees further potential: With machine data, line speeds can also be targeted for optimization.
It is a digitization approach with machine data that prevents significant losses and measurably advances the company in its ambitious sustainability goals.
What’s next?
Set up standardized alerts for throughput deviations in Grafana
Transfer standardization to other blown film systems
Measure and track scrap reduction per line
What would be possible if you could proactively prevent scrap in every shift?
These resources will help you advance:
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You don’t have to be IT or data experts
With a complete solution like the ENLYZE Manufacturing Data Platform, which is based on live production data, you not only reduce scrap but also complexity.
In many factories, modern machines work alongside equipment that has reliably produced for decades. This is precisely where ENLYZE comes in: The platform collects data from mixed machine parks and specifically custom-made lines – regardless of year or manufacturer – creating a central, complete data basis across all plants.
One platform, less complexity:
Prefabricated edge devices tailored precisely to the ENLYZE platform and specifically developed for easy and secure connections without IT knowledge
A comprehensive portfolio of connectors for OT data sources (such as PLCs and sensors), allowing not only OPC UA or MQTT-compatible systems to be connected
Data that means something, through the automated connection of machine data with relevant production information such as orders and products.
Standardized interfaces to ERP, MES, and reporting tools like Grafana and Power BI
One contact person for everything – from data collection to analysis and integration
ENLYZE reduces the complexity of data use in manufacturing. We take care of the technology, so your teams can focus on what matters: operational excellence and continuous improvement.
