What Fero is used for
Fero is used by process engineers, metallurgists, and plant managers to support process decision-making across the full lifecycle of operations. Teams use Fero to:
- Understand why process performance changes
- Explore which actions are likely to work before applying them
- Predict unseen issues and use AI recommendations to resolve them faster
Crucially, Fero makes the reasoning behind these decisions visible—showing which variables matter, how they interact, and why certain actions are recommended—so decisions can be explained, reviewed, and trusted.
How the platform works in practice
The Fero Labs Profitable Sustainability Platform is structured around how process decisions are actually made in plants—not how analytics models are typically built. It combines four tightly connected capabilities:
Fero Foundation
Fero Foundation connects historian data and external data sources, and maps process context so information reflects how the process actually runs.
Fero Diagnostics
Fero Diagnostics supports faster root-cause analysis by examining broader sets of process data than is practical manually, while clearly showing the relationships and drivers behind observed behavior, not just statistical outputs.
Fero Simulator
Fero Simulator provides a digital twin environment to explore process changes and identify more effective setpoints with transparent cause-and-effect, allowing engineers to see why a change works before applying it.
Fero Production
Fero Production supports live operations with real-time alerts, forecasting, and back-testing so teams can intervene earlier and sustain performance as conditions change, with full visibility into why alerts are triggered and how recommendations relate to process behavior.
Problems Fero addresses
Fero Labs software is designed for plants dealing with challenges such as:
✅ Slow investigations when process performance drifts
✅ Decisions delayed while waiting for expert input
✅ Trial-and-error changes made directly in production
✅ Improvements that don’t hold when conditions change
✅ Inconsistent decisions across shifts or teams
Most analytics tools and in-house models leave engineers to interpret or justify them. Fero is built to close that gap—so insight leads directly to defensible action.
Fero enables any worker on any shift to make informed expert-level decisions that relieve senior engineers to focus on more strategic
What makes Fero different
Fero is not a generic analytics or reporting platform, and it is not a black-box optimization system.
It is built specifically to support explainable and transparent, engineer-led process decision-making in real operating environments. What distinguishes Fero:
- Focuses on process behavior and cause-and-effect, not dashboards
- Encodes how experienced engineers reason about the process, not just correlations
- Makes insight explicit, explainable, and collaborative
- Captures knowledge of senior engineers and makes it accessible to every team and shift
- Supports human decision-making rather than automating it away
This makes Fero difficult to replicate with ad-hoc models or in-house analytics pipelines, which often lack consistency, context, and explainability across use cases.
Profitable Sustainability as an outcome
When process decisions are made faster, more consistently, and with clear reasoning, plants reduce waste, rework, energy use, quality issues, and unplanned downtime. These improvements lower cost and emissions at the same time.
The Fero Labs Profitable Sustainability Platform enables this by improving how processes are understood, explained, and managed day to day—not through reporting or trade-offs, but through better operational decisions.
Explore the platform
Together, these capabilities form the Fero Labs Profitable Sustainability Platform.
Fero Foundation
Prepare data and process context
Fero Diagnostics
Understand why performance changes
Fero Simulator
Explore improvements before deployment
Fero Production
Stay ahead of issues during live operations
