Notes from the 2016 ARC Industry Forum

Accomplish the Task of Calculating Lost Revenue in a Matter of Minutes

February 15, 2016

Last week was a very busy week for Seeq at the ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, ARC’s annual event for vendors and customers to discuss trends and innovations in process manufacturing systems.

The theme of this year’s show was the impact of the Industrial Internet of Things – more than a third of the breakout sessions had that in the title, if not in the content. The back story was the impact of oil prices on vendors and many customers, alike. The big story of the show was the presentations by Exxon on their outsourcing of IT efforts to Lockheed Martin and a drive toward more open, interoperable components in their control system technologies. And the surprise story of the event was Thursday morning’s session on new analytics technologies and their role in process analytics. For context, it’s Thursday morning, the last session of the event, and yet a breakout room is packed full of attendees interested in hearing about Seeq and other innovative offerings in analytics. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Brandon Lake of Iberdrola Renewables
Brandon Lake of Iberdrola Renewables

The ARC Industry Forum was a real success for Seeq. We had customers present in two sessions and they both did a great job explaining their use of Seeq and its benefits. The first speaker, from Iberdrola Renewables, talked about how their desired analysis was so hard to do that they just didn’t try. But with Seeq they could accomplish the task of calculating lost revenue in a matter of minutes. That’s a great story, and is due to the fact that Seeq enabled them to identify very precise and inter-related states in their OSIsoft historian data, adding context from other sources (see below).

The second customer was from Fisher Valves and this was an OEM “servicization” discussion, which is when an asset vendor offers monitoring as a value-added service to their products. In this case, Fisher Valves is offering remote monitoring of Fisher Valves for customers and it was an honest – and at times funny – history of the real world issues of data collection and analysis. From sneaker-net to VPN to cellular connection to leaving the valve data onsite – because it was NOT allowed to leave the site – there is always some way to get the data to the right folks for expert analysis. And that was clear as well: the incredible savings to customers who both avoided unplanned downtime and avoided unnecessary work on properly functioning equipment.

That brings us to the final session: the review of new analytics tools for process manufacturing. Again, this was a packed session at the last possible moment.  There was strong agreement in the session from all vendors on the importance of focusing on engineers, and bringing new offerings that leverage rocket science – machine learning, big data, web technologies – but don’t require rocket scientists in order to use it. Only engineers have the asset, process, or system context, so rather than transferring problems from them to IT or to data scientists, the goal is to bring innovation to enable and empower the engineer. As MTell, a machine language tool vendor noted, if we are waiting for the 100,000 data scientists they say we need in the industry to graduate from university, that’s not going to work. Seeq did not have an opportunity in this session to have a customer present, but we’re sure that any of our customers would be a great fit both to support the discussion on modern analytics tools as well as the focus on empowering engineers with innovative tools.

In addition to sessions, the Forum provided many opportunities to touch base with existing and prospective customers and share our efforts in the new R12 release. We are very interested in your feedback on new features and directions so if you haven’t tried it yet please let us know and we’d be happy to help.