PI at the heart of the digital experience

A major actor in Energy

As a major actor in energy, our client wanted to deploy a digital strategy to seize new opportunities to increase efficiency.
The client contacted SPC with the particular idea of developing innovative tools for the follow-up and improvement of their production processes.

Increase the availability of the installation

The principal objective of the project was the implementation of a common tool to be used in several fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) units in order to have a follow-up table enabling analysis of the critical parameters.
This new application must enable the industrial management to find the leverage to increase the rate of equipment availability.

PI tools at the heart of the analysis

The objective of digitalization is to represent all the specified production unit equipment in order to enable a follow-up of the critical parameters. This relies on heterogeneous data sources.

In concrete terms, the real-time data from the field sensors are complemented by the laboratory analysis results, the specifications and analyses of the incoming materials, and by the reaction calculation results from the business models.

The model must be generic, transposable and adaptable in order to cover all the standard and specific elements of each unit.
The PI Asset Framework layer enables the model to be structured and to instantiate the units, whereas the visualization aspect relies on the client web tool PI Vision.

A rapidly validated pilot

SPC worked on this project using a « waterfall » module-oriented approach (specifications, development and recipes) by including the business resources upstream. This work organization enabled the project to be divided into modules and to quickly show the results to the final users.

In 3 months, the pilot solution was developed over 2 representative units. It was successful for three reasons: firstly, the PI solution reinforced its added value for this type of process, secondly, SPC’s well-known partner OSISoft showed their agility in implementing the latest functionalities in the PI offer, and thirdly, our Client who through this project is industrializing their tools to bring about continuous improvement.

Through this project and with our experience of industrial work environments, SPC has shown its capacity to set up a digitalization solution in order to convert its clients’ data into real added value.

The next few months will enable deployment on the other units and an improvement in the pilot model.