February 16, 2007 e!Sankey is a new, US$100 windows-based software for engineers, environmental consultants and scientists that creates good-looking, pain-free process diagrams and flow charts for presentations, scientific papers and internal communications. Sankey diagrams are graphic representations of technical or economical interrelationships. They help viewers visualize and understand the connections between individual processes, for example, material, cost or energy flows. The relative value of each material flow is represented by the width of the connecting arrows within the Sankey diagram. Putting the tools into the hands of the people who have the knowledge rather than having a graphic artist in the process allows users the opportunity to visualize a wide range of processes, such as production costs, energy losses of a particular machine or material flows within specific economic sectors.
e!Sankey is extremely user-friendly and offers a wide variety of examples and templates. Adding your own graphics to the diagrams is quick and intuitive, resulting in attractive graphics for presentations and information materials.
The graphic editor interface is easy to use for both beginners and advanced users. You can create your own templates or adapt existing templates to suit your needs. Individual processes are then associated with the appropriate unit type, such as “tons” for mass transfers or “$” for monetary flows. Different colors highlight the lines connecting the processes, while their width is displayed proportional to the respective flow quantity.
e!Sankey was developed by ifu Hamburg GmbH. Its products are applications for process modeling, such as material and energy flows. These software tools help businesses be more competitive, improve their cost efficiency and support a more sustainable business operation.
