Elevated Signals Brings Resource Planning Platform to Materials Recovery Pros

Most manufacturers have limited visibility into what is happening with their products as they move through their facilities–at least at the moment that each production step is unfolding—leaving in question important details that can impact efficiency. It’s complicated, with volumes of raw materials from multiple streams going through different steps in different locations and no comprehensive picture quickly coming together to connect the dots.

Elevated Signals developed a digital platform that, according to its CEO and co-founder, Amar Singh, bypasses these problems. The digital platform tracks inventory, quality control measures, and environmental data in chemical processing plants.  The software captures each manufacturing process in real time and integrates data across all steps with the goals of optimizing processes, recovering more value, reducing waste, and helping with compliance.

Accessible on any computing device, the web-based application records and validates each step once it’s completed and shows that end users followed standard operating procedures.

Singh touts the system for its flexibility and user friendliness.

“We made it easy to configure so operators can adapt it to their workflows,” he says.

“We work with clients doing R&D who continually make changes as they find ways to optimize their processes. Sometimes that has required expensive and time-consuming adaptations to their software.”

They tend to rely on ERPs also designed to manage business operations from a single platform. While they are powerful, they are fairly rigid, expensive, and time consuming to customize, Singh says.

What he pitches as a newer generation technology comes with a tool equipped with buttons, check boxes, and fields to create forms with a desired structure and layout that can be tweaked as needed. Users click and drag to link documents, say to compare one batch of metals to another.  

“So now they can not only track processes but run analytics. Because all information is in one central database you can identify variations and trends to see what worked well – what batches got the highest yield, and why,” Singh says.

The software can generate data to understand where and why materials are lost, tracking chemicals, metals, and other materials used at each production step. It can help answer questions like what is the least volume of solvents and water needed? What resources can be recaptured? And are there ways to ultimately achieve zero emissions?

Elevated Signals launched commercially in 2020 catering to cannabis businesses in Canada when the drug was being legalized there.

“We saw an opportunity to get involved with this newly forming industry that was hungry for new technology and that had robust regulatory compliance needs and who at the same time wanted to optimize their products,” Singh says.

These were good projects for Elevated Signals to cut its teeth on due to both regulatory compliance demands and the complexity and diversity of the products.

But Singh and his team saw the same pain points in other industries and quickly expanded into vertical farming, then looked at other rising business models, targeting those focused on circular economy and climate technologies.

“These are industries that are trying to scale and continually changing and updating their processes. They are investigating how to improve their results and need software to record in real time, and to keep up with the pace of quickly evolving innovation,” Singh says.

Specialty recycler Auxilium converts mine tailings to carbon-negative building materials. The multistep process also entails recovering water from the tailings and residual critical materials like copper, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths for other applications.

“One challenge is that details around extraction, generation of different products, and sensor platforms that provide physical and chemical information all need to be integrated into one platform. Integration is key to our ability to monitor production, track efficiency, and the amount of materials produced.

“It's how we know what we received and what we get out,” says Abraham Jalbout, CEO Auxilium.

When he first invested in Elevated Signals’ platform, he was looking solely for help with inventory management in order to optimize material testing protocols.

“We needed to quantify just how much input was used for what test.  So, we were really looking to understand distribution of materials for internal use.

“But now we will use the system for production so we can quantify exactly how much material, whether critical materials like copper, or water or construction products we are generating,” Jalbout says.

He likes the traceability and the insight the technology provides to help guide next steps.

“If our process has inefficiencies and we can’t achieve the recovery rates or production quality we want, we can go back and identify with precision at what point we had an issue. And we catch those issues on the fly, based on outputs we followed using the software rather than wait for the chemical analysis to come back, which can save days,” Jalbout says.

As Auxilium prepares for pilot runs and aims to launch large commercial plants, he sees more potential benefits.

“We will need to have our KPIs well documented for internal and external stakeholders. Software like this can be valuable in terms of real-time KPI visualization.”

There is growing recognition that the manufacturing software industry is due for a renewal, and it’s slowly driving more innovations. Elevated Signals is joined by a few other startups targeting a broader base of industries and or introducing new capabilities such as connecting software with factory equipment to pull data from it, track, and analyze it.

There will be more to come, especially with the onshoring of manufacturing dedicated to decarbonizing the economy, Singh projects.  

Applications like solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles all need precious metals that must undergo multiple, complex steps to be brought back into the supply chain.

 Manufacturers and recyclers will need software to help them enhance their operations, he says.

“We want to see companies spend time optimizing their science and processes, not spending it on software. So, we try to take the technology burden away from them.”