“ERP” sounds like something for a corporate group, but it describes a simple principle: every process in a business sits in one data model instead of in several programs that know nothing about each other. The benefit does not come from the individual program. It comes from the points where two things meet, the weighing with the contract, the silo stock with the feeding, the gas reading with the feedstock it came from.
In the biogas industry that meeting still happens mostly in the plant manager’s head. The weighbridge prints slips, the stock sits in Excel, the contracts are in a folder, the gas analysis shows its readings on its own screen. Any evaluation that reaches beyond one of those sources is manual work, and therefore rare.
Six areas decide whether a system is any use in a biogas plant. What is written about TFS underneath each of them is part of the packages today. Nothing there is an announcement.
How TFS gets into an existing plant
The connection to the plant is handled by the Performance Cube, a small computer that we send out ready configured. Put it down, plug in power and internet, done; from then on it reads weights at the terminal and sends them to TFS encrypted. A day after unpacking at the latest, the plant runs digitally. The Advanced and Premium packages include a Cube.
On the security side, the Cube opens the connection outwards. Not a single port has to stand open in the plant network. The operating data is held on Austrian servers.
Which package suits a plant depends on its size, the number of suppliers, the number of sites and on whether a gas analysis is in place. The software advisor asks about that in nine questions and writes down why the recommendation turns out the way it does.
