Industrial Tank Monitoring at Scale
“With INCYT we’re achieving a lot of operational efficiency as well as peace of mind that our inventory is indeed what we think it is.”
Product: Liquid Fertiliser
Number of On-Farm Hire Tanks: 600
The EASY Liquids team had to rely on information from clients of the hire tank fleet that is located on farms, to know what the tank contents are and whether a refill is needed. These farmers are often busy and unable to get accurate information to the EASY Liquids team on time. The team also had no visibility of the stock levels of the three manufacturing facilities in Boundary Bend, Whitton and Moree unless they did a visual check or manual dip.
After trialling potential solutions from multiple suppliers, EASY Liquids found INCYT and decided to implement INCYT’s wireless pressure sensors in combination with gateway tracker devices across their hire tank fleet as well as all storage tanks at their manufacturing facilities.
With a large proportion of hire tanks now remotely monitored, the EASY Liquids team can see exactly how much liquid fertiliser each farm has available and accurately schedule deliveries to their clients. With all three manufacturing facilities now monitored as well, the sales team can see exactly what’s available for them to sell, and the operations / logistics department are able to create more accurate production and delivery schedules.
Managing complex logistics
IPF EASY Liquids is one of the leading liquid fertiliser producers in Australia, with facilities in Boundary Bend, VIC, Whitton, NSW, and Moree, NSW. Liquid fertiliser, which ranges from nitrogen potassium and phosphorus to calcium and sulfur products, can either be sold in 1,000 litre IBCs or delivered by tanker truck to farmer-owned or hired storage tanks on farms. All three facilities experience seasonal demand peaks depending on the crops that are predominantly grown in the local area such as cotton, olives or almonds. It’s these seasonal demand peaks that create logistical challenges, according to Moree based Sales Representative Matt Urquhart: “With cotton being a dominant crop in this area, we have a 8-12 week period in summer where we experience a very high demand for our products. In this time period we need to make sure that we optimise our production and delivery program so that none of our clients go without product at any time.”
Matt continues: “Our farmer clients are just as busy in this same period of time, and so just asking them to go and check the levels on their liquid fertiliser tanks can cost them an extra half hour or hour they simply don’t have. Before we had INCYT’s tank level monitoring sensors installed on these on-farm tanks, this would mean that we’d get a call from a client whose tanks were completely empty and needed a delivery immediately, or we’d send out a tanker truck to a farm only to discover once he got there that the storage tank was still full as the farm’s irrigation schedule had changed. Both situations can be very costly for us and are hard to manage from a logistics perspective.”
It was these exact scenarios that spurred EASY Liquids into looking for a tank level monitoring solution, says Dale Richter, National Operations Manager for EASY Liquids: “We have a maximum number of litres we can produce at each facility, a maximum storage capacity, a maximum delivery capacity - and strong seasonal demand in each region. So, not having visibility into the exact usage and demand used to really hold us back from achieving maximum efficiency. After looking at a number of different providers and trialling their solution, INCYT stood out to us because of how rigid the equipment is, how well it works, how easy it is to use the software, the ability to share individual tank information with farmers, it’s easy for our team to install these sensors, and the INCYT team has been great to work with. Once we made the decision to go with INCYT, it didn’t take us long to roll out the equipment throughout our fleet of hire tanks and our own facilities.
Improving customer service
Because most EASY Liquids clients only use liquid fertiliser for a couple of months per year, ensuring that they’re able to access as much product as required during this period of time is important to ensure a positive customer experience and maximisation of litres of product sold. Dale explains: “Prior to installing INCYT tank level monitoring at our facilities, our sales team would constantly have to call the production team to find out whether they were able to sell a specific quantity of product, or if there wasn’t enough stock for the transaction. This generates a lot of extra work and redundant communication, which we’ve been able to cut out with INCYT because our sales team can now see live tank level data on the INCYT dashboard and so they know exactly what they can sell and what they can promise to their clients.”
The EASY Liquids sales team isn’t the only group that has gained extra visibility however, says Matt: “Of course our production and logistics crew are constantly keeping an eye on product levels, but with INCYT we’ve been able to extend this same visibility to our clients as well. Farm managers quite often want to know what they’ve got available on their property to better-manage their irrigation schedules and nutrition plans, and being able to give them this visibility by providing them with a login to the INCYT cockpit that shows them data for the liquid fertiliser tank levels on their farm, has been great. They no longer have to manually go and check tanks but they can now check this on their phone whenever they want to, just like if they want to check their fuel or water tank levels on their farm. We’ve also configured alarms on individual tanks so that both the farmers and our team get proactive alerts from INCYT when a tank reaches a set level and we have to schedule a refill.”
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Simplifying internal processes
With EASY Liquid’s team spread across the three manufacturing facilities as well as Incitec Pivot’s head office in Melbourne, remote visibility into inventory has been key to simplifying internal processes, says Dale: “We have an admin person based in Melbourne who looks after the inventory across all three sites; they used to have to rely on manual dips or visual checks all the time. With INCYT however they can now see exactly what’s in each tank at any given time, which speeds up our internal processes and simplifies the way we work.”
For monitoring of the on-farm hire tanks, EASY Liquids rely on INCYT’s wireless gas/liquids pressure sensor which sends its data via bluetooth to a Polaris tracker, from where the data is sent up to the cloud four times per day via the LTE-M network. In situations where the LTE-M network is not available, an Andromeda tracker is used instead of a Polaris so that the data can be uploaded via low orbit satellites. For monitoring of the tanks at the manufacturing facilities, a combination of INCYT’s wireless gas/liquids pressure sensor and the solar-powered Antares tracker means that the data upload frequency can be a lot higher than four times per day without having to worry about the tracker’s battery status.
Dale concludes with: “With INCYT we’re achieving a lot of operational efficiency as well as peace of mind that our inventory is indeed what we think it is. Farmers are better prepared by having visibility of their tank levels as well as alerts through INCYT, so they’ll be able to order earlier and give us a better timeframe to work with on resupply options. Especially in the heat of the season when everything is happening, INCYT is helping us make sure that we keep our customer service levels high while also maximising the amount or product that we sell.”