A 3-Month Payback on a Salt Plant Assessment

A progressive management team at a mineral processing plant wanted to standardize and modernize their electrical and controls infrastructure for reliability and safety. The problem: nobody had a complete picture of what was actually installed, and you cannot modernize what you cannot see.

The challenge

Without comprehensive documentation, the team could not answer basic questions:

• How long does a power fault take to repair, and what does an outage cost in lost production?
• Where are the unmitigated risks in our controls and electrical systems?
• Can we plan an expansion without a documented baseline?
• Where are our safety gaps?

What we did

TEC's Facilities Assessment built the missing baseline. Engineers walked the plant and documented every PLC, HMI, motor control center, motor, panel, breaker, feeder, transformer, and network segment. Network and controls health were analyzed. Safety risks were ranked.

What we found: no current documentation of the electrical or control systems. That single gap was driving longer repair times, higher labor costs, and decisions made without data.

The outcome

• Standardization and modernization initiatives moved off the whiteboard and into execution.
• $100,000 in annual facility savings.
• $350,000 in one-time labor savings.
• Three-month payback on the assessment itself.

The assessment paid for itself before the next quarterly review. Everything after that was upside.