OVERVIEW –
The chemical industry has been a relative laggard in adopting the digital transformation agenda. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a driving force behind boosting this adoption compared to many other sectors. At the moment, we find a broad spectrum of maturity levels of Digital Transformation in the Chemical space, based on the size, market, and technology landscape of different enterprises. Discussions with chemical industry experts reveal the top limiting factors for the rapid adoption of digital technologies. Solulever, a Dutch technology startup, aims to eliminate these limitations for the chemical sector by providing a well-suited & innovative software platform called Brabo.
INDUSTRY CHALLENGES
The chemical industry is at an inflection point in utilizing digital and IIoT technologies to drive higher connectivity, efficiency, and competitive differentiation. In recent discussions with some of the executives of the chemical manufacturers, we figured out the main business benefits targeted and the top impediments they faced in adopting these technologies. The business challenges targeted towards the adoption of Industry 4.0 are multi-faceted. From complex supply chains to erratic demand patterns to sustainability and regulation pressures, there are several dimensions of business challenges that the fourth industrial revolution addresses.
Some of these include :
- With the current methods & technologies, there is generally a lack of end-to-end visibility and transparency of the operations on the shop floor. With the traditional siloed operations model, it is uncommon to find an interconnected view of manufacturing processes in totality. This limits the ability of a manufacturer to drive holistic optimization or improvement initiatives.
- One of the significant drawbacks is the low operational performance resulting from the underutilization of assets. The data produced by the shop-floor equipment is voluminous. However, it is generally not used effectively to identify actual run times, time spent in breakdowns, and repairs. Digitization of the assets helps increase overall productivity by identifying these gaps in the operations, helping eliminate them, and maximizing the utilization.
- It is generally observed that the potential of quality-linked optimization is underutilized. Manufacturers lose the opportunity for quality-linked cost-optimization since there is a disconnect between quality measurement, quality improvement, and material insight systems.
- The aging workforce and the need to capture their tacit knowledge is more important now than ever before. At the same time, the digitally-savvy next generation of operators expects digitally advanced knowledge and operation systems. However, with a disconnect in the tech landscape, operators are introduced to many systems for different operation parts. It leads to an ever-rising learning curve and thus considerable resistance from the workforce to the frequent changes in their use of technology.
- The majority of companies still operate on paper-based systems. The accuracy of the data captured in these systems has always been a question. This limits the ability of manufacturing executives to make informed decisions and drive improvements. Further, the traditional ways of scheduling maintenance on the shop floor restrict manufacturers’ ability to transition to predictive and prescriptive maintenance models.
SOLUTION
So far, the digitization of manufacturing operations needed to overcome these pressing industry challenges has been a complex affair. Multiple layers of the technologies are required to connect shop-floor and IT systems, create meaningful insights, stream the insights at speed, and make the needed business impact. Solulever has taken upon itself the challenge to simplify this somewhat complex, long-winded, and expensive affair.
Its newest development, called Brabo, manufacturing connectivity & intelligence software platform, is a single-stop solution that is fast being adopted by the leading Chemical Manufacturing enterprises. Brabo is one of the most comprehensive, flexible, and scalable platforms carefully architected to make manufacturing operations digitizing simple, fast, affordable, and fun!
Recently, the company delivered the edge variant of Brabo, called Brabo Edge Platform, to a prominent chemical manufacturing enterprise in Europe. Without needing expensive middleware or unique interfaces, this holistic platform is integrated into all the customer’s technology layers, including PLCs, DCSs, MES applications, ERP, and other IT systems.Brabo can read and interpret data coming from the shop-floor equipment of varying make and age with its multi-protocol support. Brabo now acts as an integrated system of manufacturing intelligence that the customer is using in the direction of Asset Utilization, Material Efficiency, Process Control, and OT Service Management. Brabo’s real-time data streaming capabilities bring real-time actions for operators to take corrective and preventive measures during manufacturing operations.As an added benefit, Brabo provides a drag-and-drop canvas for its customer to build, configure and visualize an advanced SCADA system – replacing the need for a third-party SCADA system. Brabo also comes bundled with its implementation of Historian, with a historian-to-historian replication functionality.Therefore Brabo acts as a single source of production data for all of the production reporting and dashboarding needs of the customer. With the ability to ingest up to 1 million data points per second, Brabo is at ease to handle the large data volumes in the large plant implementation for the customer. Starting with the Asset Utilization and OT Service Management use-cases, Solulever is working with the customer in bringing tangible business benefits in short sprints.
The platform is built 100% on microservices and open integration architecture. The benefit of GUI-driven low-code development is that creating new use-cases is a straightforward and fast process. The following 12-months roadmap includes use cases in Process Control, Material Efficient, and Quality Improvement.
KEY TAKEAWAY
The benefits of Digital Manufacturing for the Chemical industry are multi-faced in the direction of reducing manufacturing costs, improvement of asset utilization, quality improvement, operator enablement, and sustainability. Wide-scale adoption of this critical chapter of Industry 4.0 has been limited because of the associated solutions’ cost, complexity, inflexibility, and non-scalability. With the new wave of comprehensive, open-integration, and modern architecture-based software platforms, the situation is changing. Leaders in the chemical industry are fast adopting Brabo, a revolutionary platform for manufacturing connectivity & intelligence. Brabo is purpose-built to make the Digitization of Manufacturing operations simple, fast, affordable, and fun. Particularly for the Chemical Industry, Brabo is architected to deal with the various tech landscapes encountered. It is built to handle the large volumes expected & speed needed and is comprehensive to impact all relevant production KPIs. Also, it is flexible to be adopted across the enterprise and is scalable to justify the ROI irrespective of a plant’s size & profitability.
For more on Brabo, please reach info@solulever.com
