A new alliance of Cotton Incorporated with Analytics leader SAS has been formed to address productivity and sustainability across the cotton Industry. The collaboration will offer new data on crop production and ginning processing to help produce higher yields and reduce downtime for cotton processing machinery, supporting a stronger ecological mindset.
Cotton Incorporated, funded by U.S. growers of upland cotton and importers of cotton and cotton textile products, is upland cotton’s research and marketing company. The Program is designed and operated to improve cotton’s demand for and profitability.
A cotton gin separates cotton seeds from cotton fiber, and it takes about 90 seconds for a 480-pound cotton bale to go through that process. The faster the gins run, the better. By analyzing the data flowing off multiple gins over several years, SAS identified key factors affecting the processing rate, gin function, cotton condition, variety, and fiber strength to determine ideal gin speeds that improve machine uptime to get cotton products to market more quickly. SAS and Cotton Incorporated used this project to demonstrate the value of such analytics to industry leaders.
SAS collects data points at each step of the manufacturing process, including process data, sensor/IoT data, raw material data, and qualitative results data. This often results in hundreds or thousands of different variables that can be analyzed and monitored. With these manufacturing processes generating data across different machines, sensors, and plants, manufacturers often struggle with translating it into actionable information. This is where SAS can help.
