Legacy data stacks stall digital acceleration
The age-old notion that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” applies to all aspects of business, including the digital transformation of industry. One common source of failure lies in an imbalance between the tactical and strategic dimensions of digital strategy. Many tactical approaches focus too much on the discrete business solution instead of strategically architecting to solve the future challenge and build business solutions.
Taking a strategic, long-term approach to its manufacturing organization’s digital transformation journey, Celanese wanted a platform architecture that would enable the broad data accessibility, standardization, and automation necessary to accelerate solution development in an open environment. This new approach to building, deploying, and scaling digital solutions would need to include the following:
- A platform to integrate and contextualize information across many key data sources that include global data standards, definitions, and classifications.
- Unlimited use case opportunities across key business functions and focus areas.
- The ability to create repeatable, transparent, optimized, and autonomous digital solutions with the ability to scale those solutions across multiple global sites.
An integrated “Digital Plant of the Future”
Celanese leveraged Cognite Data Fusion® to build an integrated manufacturing portal that serves as a single repository for all its domain experts.
Cognite Data Fusion® serves as the data platform for this portal, consolidating and contextualizing equipment hierarchy data, reliability and quality data, events and time series, as well as data from work orders, 3D and photogrammetry, Manufacturing Execution Systems, ERP/SAP, and unstructured documents.
This data is then made available through a unified, role-based experience that enables integrated analytics and actionable insights (e.g., dashboarding, analytics) and optimized digital workflows that transform planning and execution processes. Cognite Data Fusion® democratizes data access and makes real-time assets more easily discoverable to plant personnel.
With the support of Accenture's solution integration team, Celanese has integrated processes and systems on top of Cognite Data Fusion® to roll out initial use cases at its Clear Lake, Texas, chemical facility within the integrated manufacturing portal, including:
- Open Industrial Digital Twin: A 3D production unit representation with full contextualized data enriched with recommendation models for actionable advice and to trigger automatic actions.
- Digital Worker: An application that equips field workers with data to improve efficiency, digitalize current operator rounds to create integrated workflows, and improve data flow to second-line workers and maintenance planners.
- No-Code Data Analytics: A powerful tool for engineers and domain experts to explore, trend, and analyze industrial data. It gives industrial experts instant access to data and no-code tools to find, understand and troubleshoot for actionable insights.
- Robotics: Deployed Boston Dynamic’s ‘Spot’ robot onsite to build and maintain the digital twin, as well as enable autonomous inspection, telepresence, and asset tracking.
Celanese believes its digital transformation is an ongoing journey to put data into the hands of experts who will build, deploy, and scale hundreds of use cases. With Cognite Data Fusion’s ability to scale, the integrated manufacturing portal will function as a standardized use case library for the company’s manufacturing operations globally with plans to continue to add use case and process templates over time: from incident management, robotics and automation, real-time process plant optimization, and automatic EIP isolations, to connected worker, asset performance management, incident management, real-time process optimization, automation, and robotics.
Transforming the “Day in the Life” of Celanese experts
For Celanese, a successful digital transformation requires the ability to move quickly and innovate at scale while keeping its employees at the center of the experience. One of the company’s primary goals of the Digital Plant of the Future is to empower its employees by giving them the tools to do even better work more easily, with the power of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence.
In the initial role out of the integrated manufacturing portal at the Clear Lake site, Celanese has successfully:
- Improved visibility and collaboration
- Improved tracking and trending of historical data
- Reduced time spent on data discovery and analysis
- Improved compliance
Celanese has completed the first wave of its Digital Plant of the Future, and as it moves into the next phase of its digitalization journey, Celanese will look to:
- Deliver solutions across autonomous inspection and a contextualized data platform
- Operationalize high-impact use cases
- Scale use cases to additional global facilities
- Replicate repeatable use cases across its manufacturing footprint