Featured Clients
Organizations That Have Chosen DES
DES technology is operating today at facilities across North America. These organizations have documented the results.
DES clients don't talk about efficiency improvements in percentages. They talk about millions of dollars per year - because that's what autonomous process control delivers at industrial scale. Every result below is documented, verified, and still accumulating.
These are not projections built from models. They are not estimates from audits. They are the actual, measured financial results generated by DES technology currently operating at client facilities across North America - results that continue to accumulate every day.
Before DES, this facility was considered well-managed. Experienced operators, modern equipment, professional engineering support. The gap between their actual performance and true optimum was invisible, because it had always been there. It was the baseline.
DES EMRS deployment revealed and closed that gap. Fossil fuel costs fell by over $500,000 per month. Electric power imports decreased by a further $60,000 per month. Total pulp production cost declined by 2.5% - a figure that, at production scale, represents one of the most significant single-source cost reductions in the facility's history.
The facility had not been underperforming by any conventional measure. The conventional measure was simply wrong.
This facility operated in a real-time pricing environment - meaning every hour, the cost of electricity changed. Every hour, the economically optimal facility configuration changed with it. And every hour, the time available to recognize the shift, calculate the response, and execute the change was measured in minutes.
OptiMaxx eliminated the human bottleneck entirely. Deployed at this paper mill, it reduced electrical costs by $50,000 per month - not by using less power, but by using it when it was cheapest and less of it when it wasn't. The facility's production schedule never changed. Its energy bill did.
The payback period was measured in weeks. The ongoing return is measured in decades.
An electric utility managing a complex multi-fuel, multi-boiler power station in Alberta. A facility operating in a sophisticated regulatory environment with experienced process control professionals already in place. By any standard, not a facility with obvious optimization upside.
DES EMRS disagreed with that assessment and proved it - generating an average of $25,000 per day in natural gas cost savings from the moment autonomous control was engaged. Annualized, that is over $9 million per year from a facility that already considered itself well-optimized. The gap between "well-optimized" and truly autonomous optimization is consistently larger than clients expect and consistently profitable to close.
Synthetic crude oil production at one of Canada's most significant oil sands projects. A facility where energy intensity is extreme, margins are perpetually pressured, and the complexity of simultaneous optimization challenges would defeat any traditional control approach. A facility that needed something fundamentally different.
DES Advanced Control Technologies delivered it - reducing energy costs by $11.2 million per year. A result significant enough that the operations supervisor's response has become the most-quoted line in DES's history. His testimonial is below.
That is the standard DES aspires to at every client facility: a system so capable and reliable that the humans overseeing it can focus on improvement rather than survival.
Every DES deployment generates financial returns that justify the investment many times over. But the operational improvements that accompany those financial results change how a facility functions at a fundamental level and create value that compounds long after the payback period ends.
Process upsets caused by constraint violations cost facilities enormous amounts in maintenance, lost production, and emergency response - costs that rarely appear on any single line item but collectively represent a significant fraction of operating expense. DES's continuous constraint management eliminates most of them. The savings are real. They just don't announce themselves.
Consistent process control produces consistent product. Consistent product commands consistent pricing and often a premium in markets where reliability is valued. DES clients regularly report quality improvements that open pricing opportunities they did not previously have access to. This is not an efficiency story. It is a revenue story.
Regulatory compliance in an autonomously optimized facility is not a periodic management challenge - it is a continuously enforced constraint. DES systems observe environmental limits every second, without exception, without operator vigilance required. Compliance becomes structural rather than behavioral and the risk of costly violations essentially disappears.
Perhaps the most durable benefit of a DES deployment is what it does to an operating culture. When the question changes from "How did we do?" to "What prevented us from doing better?" - an organization begins pursuing the next frontier of performance rather than defending the current one. That shift is worth more than any single financial metric.
Initial engineering audits have identified significant optimization potential at the following facilities - quantified in financial terms, ahead of any commitment.
Initial audit completed. Significant potential for energy cost reduction identified across the facility's power generation and steam distribution systems. Quantification in progress.
Audit indicates substantial savings opportunity in multi-boiler campus steam distribution and electrical demand management. Preliminary findings shared with facilities leadership.
Every DES engagement begins with a free engineering audit that quantifies the specific savings available at your facility, before any commitment is made.
DES technology is operating today at facilities across North America. These organizations have documented the results.
"As always, you and your team of 'energy geniuses' set the standard that others fail to meet. Any facility that fails to embrace DES remarkable technology would be remiss in their operational reliability and energy reduction objectives."
"In the very near future in North America there will be two kinds of mills: those that embrace DES technology and those that are no longer in business."
"I guess I'll have to start bringing in a paperback." The most honest performance review a control system has ever received, and the one DES is most proud of. When operators have nothing to do, the system is working.
"DES is truly the leader not only in Closed Loop energy management but Process Optimization as well. In addition to their outstanding control solutions, DES truly understands the process and how to apply the technology. The benefit exceeds anything that we had previously envisioned as possible."
Contact our engineering team for a free preliminary evaluation. We will identify your specific optimization opportunities, quantify them in documented financial terms, and show you exactly what autonomous process control can change at your facility, before you commit anything.
