Chemicals customers maximize the value of their data management investment

Dispatches from AVEVA World 2023

Posted: December 13, 2023

At AVEVA World in San Francisco last month, we were excited to hear about the great progress our customers are making in better managing their data. Chemicals companies are expanding the ways they use data and increasing the value realization of their digital investments.

Speakers from Wacker Chemie AG described how, after years of dealing with excessive project costs and risks, they have increased the efficiency of their global engineering supply chain, including contractors. The company is using AVEVA™ Unified Engineering for its plant design, enabling central data hosting, concurrent engineering, global access, and flexible scaling for its projects. It now has centralized 3D plant models hosted in the cloud for investment projects and optimization measures. Using the cloud enabled Wacker Chemie AG to overcome the challenges that come with sharing data across multiple worldwide locations, and has ensured that its applications run at high performance with all the required IT security. Find out more about AVEVA’s design tools.

Nutrien shared some great examples of data wins from the operations side. The company needed to improve operations troubleshooting, monitoring, and optimization across nitrogen facilities, as well as enhance its teams’ collaboration, and address some skills gaps across the organization. With that in mind, it created the Nitrogen Real-time Operations Center (NROC). The company used AVEVA™ PI System™ for operations data management infrastructure, alongside AVEVA™ Unified Operations Center. This combination of products gives users a comprehensive layer of visualization (from online sensors to enterprise-level dashboards) and enabled Nutrien to create a robust integrated technology platform. Using this platform helped it to streamline operational processes (reducing downtime and increasing production capability) and enhance equipment monitoring for early failure detection and fast troubleshooting. These successes helped to position the company for continuous growth, adaptation, and operational optimization through NROC​.

Jonathan Alexander, Manufacturing AI and Advanced Analytics Manager at Albemarle, presented some impressive results as he spoke at his fifth consecutive AVEVA World. Albemarle knew it had to increase the efficiency of its manufacturing processes to expand its lithium production capabilities. The company implemented operations data management with AVEVA PI System, machine-learning models, and other digital tools. It estimates it has saved more than US$50 million annually, which includes a 75% reduction in environmental incidents, as well as improvements in overall equipment effectiveness, quality, capacity, raw material utilization, equipment reliability, customer satisfaction, and overall sustainability.

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These, alongside several other presentations at the AVEVA World 2023, demonstrated that chemicals companies can align their individual and corporate goals and significantly increase their return on investment in digital solutions. With a good strategy, the right tools, and a focus on empowering workers, chemicals companies are making the most of their data.