Chemicals Industry Update: Part 2 – Chemicals Industry Leaders Use Advanced Analytics to their Advantage

Learn how Seeq’s chemical industry customers have been using advanced analytics to make their impact on the triple bottom line.

Our last blog covered the need for differentiation of products, brand image, and workplace culture as levers for the chemicals industry to maintain profitability and attract talent. In this edition, we’ll dive a little deeper into how a few global chemicals companies are using advanced analytics to impact change.

Enabling capabilities for change

The technological horsepower behind many leading chemical industry use cases consists of connectivity, interoperability, and ease of use. Flexible architecture deployment options ensure the software aligns with current and future IT strategies. Equipped with live connectivity to any time series database required for analysis, teams can eliminate significant time (80% of their valuable time to be exact) spent collecting, aligning, and organizing data for analysis and let process experts dive right into the fun part. An intuitive user interface with a range of experiences from point-and-click to full-code ensures a variety of users can extract maximum value from the software.

These enabling capabilities can be mapped to the differentiation strategies that chemical manufacturers need to deploy to remain competitive.

• Product – In specialty chemical production, one lever for boosting market share through product differentiation is to make higher quality product than the competition. The hardest part of using analytics to improve quality is overlaying outcome-based quality data to live sensor data and accurately accounting for the process dynamics between the measurement points. Seeq connects to and automatically aligns timestamps of different data sources and provides users with tools to identify the time delay of greatest correlation between upstream (process) and downstream (quality) data.
• Brand – For the chemical and petrochemicals industries, making measurable and tangible progress towards sustainability pledges has become a crucial brand differentiator. When it comes to emissions data, challenges in data access and availability are at the top of the list. Whether that means connecting to a historian, a decade’s old spreadsheet, or a cloud data store, access to where the data resides currently and wherever it ends up in the future is key, as is the ability to easily join data stored in different systems of record over time. Industry leaders are frequently discussing how Seeq is being used to help them better understand and combat their emissions by delivering this critical data access.
• Culture – Technology is one lever that helps manufacturers attract and retain talent. Using relevant toolsets that foster collaboration and encourage continuous employee development have become key values for new entrants to the workforce. Technologies embedded with knowledge capture capabilities help retain organizational knowledge even in “the great resignation”.

Moving the needle on the triple bottom line

The triple bottom line (Figure 1) is a useful model to evaluate how business decisions can be made to positively impact society, the environment, and shareholder value. Seeq advanced analytics software helps chemical manufacturers solve problems that improve production, reliability, quality, and sustainability outcomes and creates an environment that “makes engineering fun again,” according to Conneqt 2022’s keynote speaker, Brent Railey, Manager of Data Science at Chevron Phillips Chemical Company.

Over the past year, Seeq’s chemical industry customers have been using advanced analytics to make their impact on the triple bottom line. The following use cases and customer stories show how advanced analytics can help companies transform their investments in time series data storage into transformational insights.

Chevron Oronite prioritizes product quality

At Chevron Oronite, process engineering and data science teams are working together to optimize batch quality and keep cycle times low, boosting revenue by both increasing product volumes and margins. In the batch filtration optimization use case presented by Chevron at Conneqt 2022, data scientist Mina Souliman explains how they leveraged Seeq to package a dynamic batch optimization model into an easy-to-consume dashboard that empowered operators to make data-driven process modifications to drive business value.

Syngenta is reducing its carbon footprint

Syngenta is using advanced analytics to take tangible action toward their 2030 Sustainable Operations Commitments, which includes the goal to “Reduce the carbon intensity of operations by 50%.” Dr. Stephen Pearson, Principal Data Scientist, presented a few of the Seeq use cases driving them forward at Hannover Messe 2022. The near-real-time carbon intensity estimates he discussed provide Syngenta the opportunity to make data-driven decisions that will track measurable progress towards their 2030 goals, helping them emerge as a leader in sustainability in the chemical industry.

Chevron Phillips Chemical Company is empowering engineers to experiment faster

Chevron Phillips Chemical Company (often referred to in the industry as CP Chem) has been working to transform the analytics capabilities of their workforce. In Brent Railey’s Conneqt 2022 keynote “Accelerating Business Impact Through Cultural Innovation”, he talks about the evolution of self-service analytics at CP Chem. From the dark days of Historian Excel Add-ins to business intelligence tools, CP Chem was hunting for a tool that would help their engineers analyze time series process data faster, more collaboratively, and solve previously unsolvable problems. The cross-site collaboration and networking spawned by solving problems together using Seeq is just one of the lasting cultural impacts wrought by the adoption of this common analytics language.

Looking Forward

The return to in-person events in 2022 has brought chemical companies together to share how digital transformation and innovation are making a positive impact on their product, brand perception, and company culture.

If you are ready to discuss how Seeq can be a lever for your company’s triple bottom line, contact us to speak with one of our industry experts and schedule a demo today.