Owl in Extrusion: Where a 1–2% Yield Improvement Turns Into Real Money
Owl use case series: extrusion.
In extrusion, the economics are unforgiving: raw material and energy dominate the cost structure, and the margin lives in the details. That is also the good news — because it means even a 1–2% improvement in yield turns directly into measurable euros.
You can't, however, improve what you can't see. And on many extrusion lines, the things that quietly eat yield: wall-thickness drift, scrap between recipe changes, differences between shifts. Those are exactly the things nobody sees until the monthly numbers arrive.
What Owl watches on an extrusion line
Our Owl platform connects to the line through standard industrial interfaces (OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus TCP, Siemens S7 and others) and follows the signals an extruder professional actually cares about:
- Melt pressure and temperature profiles, the early warnings of process drift
- Motor load and line speed, capacity and wear in one view
- Energy per kilogram of output, not just kilowatt-hours, but what a kilo of good product actually costs
- Yield and scrap by line, recipe and shift, so improvement work targets facts, not hunches
The moment something drifts, Owl raises a live alarm rather that a note at the shift handover, or a surprise in next month's report.
Recipes stop living in people's heads
Every extrusion plant has that one operator who "knows how the line likes to run." Owl's recipe management turns that knowledge into versioned, approved recipes with full traceability: which recipe version ran, on which line, for which order. When the same product runs 3% better on Tuesday night shift, you can find out why and make it the new normal.
Maintenance before the screw fails
Screw, barrel and haul-off wear develop slowly and fail expensively. Because Owl already sees motor load, pressures and throughput over time, predictive maintenance becomes a natural extension: trends reveal wear long before it becomes unplanned downtime.
What it costs and where to start
Owl is licensed per site, with unlimited users. A typical four-line extrusion plant with the platform, three additional lines and the See & Improve module for OEE and yield optimization runs at about 1,750 € per month, a number that one recovered percentage point of yield usually repays on its own.
And you don't have to start with four lines. Start with one line — or one critical device — and scale as the results come in.
Want to take your extrusion to a measured state? See our extrusion page or get in touch.