Koch Engineered Solutions (KES; Wichita, Kan.), a unit of Koch Industries, Inc. (Koch), announced the launch of OnPoint, a connected solutions business whose mission is to leverage KES' engineering capabilities and expertise – in combination with digital technology – to deliver greater value for industry. OnPoint will embed the expertise of KES's equipment businesses into customers' operations to improve efficiency, yield, reliability, environmental performance, and safety.
"OnPoint represents KES's commitment to building new and greater preferred partnerships by more fully leveraging existing capabilities and adding new ones," said Dave Dotson, President of KES. "This is an important step in KES's transformation for further innovation and growth, and the experienced team we have leading OnPoint will provide unrivaled solutions and value for all our customers."
OnPoint delivers real-time insights and enhanced system performance across a variety of industrial domains through a portfolio of digital solutions. OnPoint's solutions harness knowledge and experience from the KES equipment businesses to drive advanced, actionable insights that help operators identify root causes, analyze performance, and optimize equipment and operations. Smart Combustion, a capability developed by John Zink Hamworthy Combustion (John Zink), serves as a foundation for OnPoint with the virtual combustion assistant EMBER as well as ZoloSCAN. Koch-Glitsch's TowerView solution applies expertise in mass transfer and is another emerging solution in the OnPoint portfolio, along with established analytics platform CORTEX and business intelligence solution Energy Manager. This broad portfolio provides a common platform to allow plant operators to gain real-time, actionable instructions and advanced analytics insights.
OnPoint's Smart Combustion solutions are currently being deployed at select Flint Hills Resources facilities, where EMBER is operating in heaters and furnaces. EMBER utilizes data already existing in site data historians to provide instructions to plants on how to reach their most optimized state of operation by reducing inefficiencies and focusing workflow where it is most valuable. When one Flint Hills petrochemical facility used EMBER, it saw a three to five percent increase in throughput for an individual furnace without significantly increasing firing rates. The company expected millions of dollars in new capability integrating EMBER into its operation.
"Historically, industrial operations have not taken full advantage of the data they routinely capture, the knowledge of equipment designers, or advanced data analytics to enable actionable insights," said Chip Hilarides, President of OnPoint. "OnPoint was created to bring the deep expertise of John Zink, Koch-Glitsch, and other KES businesses to industrial operations and usher in the next generation of efficient, profitable operations. The OnPoint team works directly with customers to deliver solutions that help them operate safer, cleaner, more efficiently, and with higher throughput."