Whenever there is a discussion concerning the plant performance improvement or capacity increase, usually the first idea is to install energy saving/ additional equipment or implementation of modern technologies. Only a very few sugar factories consider to look inside to find the inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the existing process and equipment, but most sugar factories consider to go for new equipment for performance and capacity increase. Implementation of new equipment is not a bad idea, but it is an expensive approach.

IPRO Group carries out many plant audits in different parts of the world every year and suggests required measures to its clients in a stepwise approach to enhance plant performance and capacity. The audit reports also highlight the CAPEX and ROI for each step. In most cases the step 1 is the optimization of existing process and equipment which usually requires very little investments but significantly does improve the plant performance and capacity.