FeedSmart Recipe Optimizer

FeedSmart Recipe Optimizer

This tool exploits permitted variations in a recipe’s ingredient proportions to engineer maximum savings and determine the lowest possible cost for every blend, formulation or compound you process. Based on the costs, proportions, tolerances and feeding accuracies entered, the Recipe Optimizer minimizes total ingredient cost by strategically replacing expensive ingredients with less costly recipe components, all without violating quality limits.

The Efficiency Grid

In addition to its cost-saving potential, FeedSmart’s tolerance-based recipe model also suggests two useful measures of process efficiency:

• Recipe Efficiency and
• Feeding Efficiency.

FeedSmart’s Efficiency Grid combines these two efficiency measures in an integrated graph to provide a compelling snapshot of current and potential savings. It provides a clear and dynamically changing visualization of the improvement in recipe efficiency enabled in a tolerance-based approach, as well as the added savings realized through improved feeder performance.

Recipe Efficiency

With FeedSmart’s ability to operate anywhere within a band of acceptable proportions for each ingredient based on product quality standards, total recipe cost can vary over a defined range, depending on the chosen proportions for each ingredient. This suggests the concept of Recipe Efficiency, a measure of where a given recipe exists on its cost spectrum. 0% efficiency represents the recipe's maximum theoretical cost, and 100% represents its minimum theoretical cost. Where a given recipe lies on this spectrum provides a measure of the potential for further cost reduction through improved feeding performance.

Feeding Efficiency

Improved feeding accuracy has long been employed to reduce costs by avoiding the need to overfeed critical or expensive ingredients. When following a traditional “target-value” recipe where ingredient setpoints are fixed, as long as established quality limits are not violated, no specific material savings can be realized, regardless of the feeding system employed. In addition, the ongoing variability of the final product being produced when using a less accurate feeding system will be higher. However, by using the FeedSmart Recipe Optimizer to convert to a tolerance-based recipe where ingredient setpoints are adjusted to their optimum level without violating established product quality standards, and by employing a more accurate feeding system, processors can realize maximum savings. FeedSmart’s tolerance-based optimization changes the logic, and each improvement in feeding accuracy reduces recipe cost by a specific, calculable and achievable amount. It turns any improvement in feeding accuracy, no matter how small, into a lower cost recipe.

TruCost Savings Comparator

When it comes to performing financial analyses, predicting long-term project savings and identifying your favored supplier for feeder systems, the TruCost™ Savings Comparator is the tool called for. TruCost combines data from as many as twenty FeedSmart Recipes with acquisition and support cost data you enter, and then compares supplier offerings and projects costs and savings over process lifetimes of up to twenty years.

• Identify favored supplier in areas of acquisition cost, total ingredient savings, support cost, and total comparative savings.
• Evaluate offerings from any number of feeder system suppliers.
• Compute the savings achievable with improved feeder performance.
• Calculate project savings over process lifetimes up to 20 years.

TruCost is fully supplier-independent and results depend only on user data. It calculates and compares feeding system return on investment and payback time for each supplier. Furthermore it charts comparative total savings over the process lifetime and hourly comparative savings in each cost area. TruCost allows user entry of inflation and interest rates for accurate net present value (NPV) analysis.