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BONANZA ASSOCIATES | PREDICTIVE MODELING SOLUTIONS FOR MANUFACTURING FACILITIES

Ethanol Producer Magazine Features Bonanza Associates

Brian Pasbrig (Plant Manager, SME), Patti Sprouse (Owner, Bonanza), and Alex Sprouse (Daughter and Summer Intern at Bonanza) in the Show Me Ethanol Plant, Carrollton, Missouri.

Bonanza Associates is honored to be featured in the July 2019 Issue of Ethanol Producer Magazine. Here are a few highlights from the article:

  • Patti Sprouse, co-founder and president of Bonanza Associates, describes her company’s predictive modeling software, Prospector, as both a flight simulator and GPS for ethanol plants. It’s similar to a flight simulator, she says, because “it allows the clients to really practice running the plant in different ways, without anybody getting hurt or bad decisions [being] made that are going to have costly implications.”

  • Brian Pasbrig, Plant Manager at SME says, “Since it’s a mass balance, if some part of the process—say the centrifuge aspect of an ethanol plant—if that’s not running quite right and it’s slowly degrading in performance, you can pick that up much more quickly because Prospector has charts that are monitoring things on an hourly basis,” Hise says. The troubleshooting part of the software, he adds, is one of the more advanced functions. “Our experience with the paper industry is that over time, people become more comfortable using it and start to use some of the more advanced features, beyond planning for outages.”

  • Pasbrig says Prospector differs from other systems ethanol plants are currently using in that it can predict plant outcomes from small operational changes. “I don’t know that there’s a lot of facilities that have an active mass balance predictive model that says, ‘If I do this very small process change, here’s how it affects the entire plant,’” he says. “Usually, the operator in the control room can take a stab at that, but this tool actually tells you if I change just one small thing, the—centrifuge feed—it tells me how it’s going to change the water balance on the front end in four days.”

  • Sprouse agrees. She says in both the ethanol and paper industries, prospective customers tell her they already have a spreadsheet that can do what Prospector promises. But Prospector is different, she says. “Prospector models the entire plant, so it’s not just optimizing one department or one piece of equipment. It’s optimizing the entire facility so everybody’s on the same page and there’s one vision for how the plant plans to run.”

    • Show Me Ethanol Begins Using Prospector

    Patti Sprouse (Owner, Bonanza) and Brian Pasbrig (Plant Manager, SME) in front of DDGS at Show Me Ethanol Plant. Distiller's dried grains with solubles (DDGS) are the nutrient rich co-product of dry-milled ethanol production.

    Prospector has been installed and is now being used at Show Me Ethanol (SME Carrollton, MO), beginning late 2018. Bonanza is in discussions with a number of other fuel ethanol plants who are considering purchasing a license for our software. We are collaborating with Brian Pasbrig (Plant Manager at SME), who presented a paper at the Fuel Ethanol Workshop and Conference on June 12th. We believe our modelling tools are an excellent fit for the Fuel Ethanol production industry, and will add value to Ethanol plants in the same ways it has saved our pulp and paper clients an average of $1MM annually.

    We would welcome the opportunity to visit your plant and provide a demonstration of Prospector.

    Manage your Future,
    instead of simply reacting to the past.

    © Copyright 2019 Bonanza Associates of NC, LLC