Fin. La Fine. Das Ende. Slutningen. Vége. The End! – Recapping the Seeq 2023 European Roadshow Season

The Seeq 2023 European Roadshow season has come to an end. Let’s look back to where the journey took us.

From March to November, the Seeq team and our local partners stopped in 8 different countries hosting seminars for process industry professionals to learn how advanced analytics are helping to drive operational excellence and sustainability objectives. The roadshow offered opportunities to listen, share, and network with fellow process industry and technology professionals in their region.  

The many flavors of ROI

In addition to trying out the local fare, we also collected customer success stories as souvenirs at every stop. Here is a sample of some of our favorites: 

• Abbott Nutrition is modeling expected wastewater to reduce the amount of waste product by 0.1-0.4% per year. 
• Eli Lilly deployed online models that eliminated the need for line break, physical testing, and measurement procedures.   
• Kuraray has reduced the time spent on routine six sigma analyses by 90%. 
• MOL Group is using Seeq capsules to capture and optimize APC grade transitions reducing monthly transition time (making low margin product) by an average of 6 hours. 
• LyondellBasell is leveraging Seeq ML to predict compressor failures > 3 hours earlier, avoiding 8 days of flaring per year and $150k in raw material losses to the flare.  
• Holcim has seen a 1% improvement in thermal substitution rate, using alternative fuel sources, like non-recyclable plastics, to generate process heat input. 

Different Cultures, Universal Challenges

As we worked our way across the continent, there were a few key themes that popped up city after city.  

1. Remote Operations Centers that were once the exception are becoming the norm. 
   With the COVID-19 pandemic as a proof point, many manufacturers conceded that all employees might not need to be onsite at all times to be effective. In some cases, this was a revelation. But at Air Liquide they were ahead of the curve, using Seeq combined with AVEVA PI & AF to monitor the efficiency of their air separation units from afar, well before anyone was forced to work from home. In recent years, they’ve been joined by cement and building materials companies, utilities, and others as it became clear that technology has evolved to a point where you can have technical resources in major metropolitan areas supporting remote production sites.
2. No one software achieves all business objectives. A complementary solution ecosystem is key.
   Most of us have toolboxes at home with wrenches, screwdrivers, saws, and the like. Just as you wouldn’t use a wrench to put a nail in the wall, you wouldn’t use Seeq as your historian, ERP, or model management system – there are solutions built for that. In the 15+ architecture examples shared on this roadshow, we saw Seeq complementing the likes of historians, ERP systems, multivariate analytics tools, ML & AI platforms, DevOps, workflow automation and more. Digital transformation is all about upskilling your employees on the strengths of the tools in their arsenal, so they can select the right tool for the right job to get the best results.
3. “Good partners, that you can count on, are worth their weight in gold.” – Marjan Milošević, Head of Industrial IT at Holcim
   People and organizational challenges continue to be the largest hurdles in achieving successful technology deployment. By developing close partnerships with your technology vendors, you can ensure technology users are trained, technical roadblocks are addressed fast, and the value delivered is documented. Technologies that are easy to use, maintain, and sustain will become engrained in the way your organization works.
4. Nail it and scale it. It was our mindset when Seeq began 10 years ago, and the philosophy still holds.
   One of the easiest ways to become overwhelmed in the execution of a digital transformation initiative is to start too broad. At Seeq, our recommendation has always been to start small. Figure out what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it on a small data set for a single asset. Really nail it. Then deploy it to the masses of similar assets. As Seeq has evolved, and whilst our development team put an emphasis on analytics at scale, the rapid replication of analyses across sites and equipment has gotten simpler and speedier. We heard from countless customers that their access to Seeq Data Lab and Seeq’s API enable them to scale in ways that wouldn’t be possible to do manually.and last but not least…..
5. GenAI is cool! But having the data infrastructure and access in place to actually benefit from it is cooler.
   “We cannot unleash the full potential of AI without having access to the data.” Thank you to Sami Bahroun, Head of Industrial Data Analytics & Production Optimization at Solvay. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. With all the hype around AI and generative AI today, it can be easy to get lost in the buzz. But an AI model is only as good as the data feeding it. It’s now more important than ever to have live, easily accessible access to all the data relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve. Platforms that can leverage all of a company’s existing data infrastructure investments will be the most well positioned to ride the latest buzzword waves. 

Huge thanks to our customers and partners around the world, without which these roadshows would not be possible! Special shoutout to our partners who sponsored this year’s event and to our customers who shared their stories. You continue to amaze us with your innovation! 

If you missed us this year, you can catch up on content that was presented here: https://engage.seeq.com/seeq-regional-tour-europe-recap  

Stay tuned for dates and locations for the Seeq 2024 Roadshow!