All Eyes on Customer, Innovation, and Market Leadership at AspenTech OPTIMIZE 2015

Summary
At the recent 2015 AspenTech OPTIMIZE conference in Boston, Massachusetts, more than 700 attendees from 40 countries learned about the latest process and technology improvements in more than 120 sessions. ARC Advisory Group noted that customer attendance appeared to be unaffected by the economic uncertainty related to current oil prices. ARC analysts had the opportunity to attend many of these industry sessions and speak directly with many of the company's customers. For the first time, the company also broadcast the entire event live to enable its 1,300 global employees to learn directly from their customers.

This year's event focused primarily on demonstrating AspenTech's commitment to developing transformative solutions for the energy, chemicals, and engineering & construction business segments. According to Antonio Pietri, AspenTech's new President and CEO, in just eight years the company has transformed itself into a market leader in process optimization software. Mr. Pietri has a long history with the company, joining with the Setpoint acquisition when Larry Evans was CEO. The company estimates that the combined industry value added by AspenTech software is now more than $50 billion and cited the relevance of its solutions to the mission-critical aspects of operations. According to Mr. Pietri, the company's core imperatives are "innovation, customer, and market leadership."

Key ARC takeaways from the conference include:

• The company is considering building an asset optimization solution based around industry-specific process analytics
• Enterprise analytics for the process industries may require a change in how applications are deployed by using system integrators and global service providers
• Growth by strategic acquisitions since 1990 has transformed AspenTech from a small process optimization provider, to a leading one
• Design the plant, optimize the plant, and manage the supply chain remain at the core of the company's technical solutions
• AspenTech has made the "customer" an imperative and plans to redefine the meaning of mission-critical to the process industry; and the customer's business, and thereby creating greater visibility of the importance of the company's aspenONE solutions
• The company's roots in academia represent an ecosystem of scholarly partners within the AspenTech Academy, which continue to provide research and industry guidance

Addressing Customer Expectations
After 34 years of acquisitions in the simulation market, in the last three years the company started moving in a new direction. Rather than just focusing on material simulation, AspenTech is pushing the peripherals of the plant and looking to process safety applications and asset optimization.

New workers have different expectations of the software. With the loss of more experienced workers in industry, AspenTech believes it must do its part to bridge the knowledge gap. Mr. Pietri announced that the company is currently working on industry-specific process analytics to help address this. Current model-based software tools are powerful, but the company's experts are now figuring out unique ways to look at data to help solve previously unsolved business and operational problems. He believes that the data-rich plant models across engineering and manufacturing are ripe for exploitation and the next 20 years will be about asset optimization.

Engineering Optimization and Simulation
Providing users with relevant information and offering education and support is challenging with over 100,000 users located in remote places around the globe. During the Engineering plenary session, Vikas Dhole, AspenTech's VP of Product Management for Engineering, presented the three pillars of engineering to establish the backdrop for success as an engineering design and simulation software market leader: Usability, Collaboration and Innovation.

Innovation to Expand the Scope of Optimization
AspenTech has incorporated several new innovative products into the aspenONE solution set, continuing the direction from the last conference to change the way people use technology. The company will continue to work with academia to expand the scope of optimization. Multi-dimensional optimization, sequential modeling to simultaneous modeling and integrated optimization will save substantial project costs. The company will continue to develop Smart Flow sheets. Other innovations will include areas such as:

Usability
There is a huge shift in the user base and customer expectations are changing. Forty percent of users are brand new, while 63 percent are older than 45. AspenTech believes a consistent and common workflow specific to refining or chemicals will improve adoption of the tools.

Collaboration
The concept of "activation" combines a natural workflow with data integrated for other complimentary aspenONE applications. The company believes that centralizing the simulation models can greatly reduce the effort required to estimate equipment design, turning the normal process upside down and expanding the use of the tools across more engineering disciplines.

Simulation in the Cloud
During the plenary session, David Vickery from Dow Chemical's Engineering Solutions Technology Center presented his company's view of using AspenTech solutions. Dow was an early adopter of the AspenPlus technology and noted that it used to consider the products to be point solutions, but is now seeing more true integration. Mr. Vickery believes that adding the activation tool to allow users to perform an energy analysis has now become an integral part of Dow's engineering process. Also, the desire to be able to run plant simulations without having to install software preceded his tenure at Dow. Now, his team is developing pilot projects using simulation in the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Supply Chain Improvements
The majority of refineries use the company's PIMS solution to plan crude feedstock requirements. Now, according to the company, its PIMS-AO (Advanced Optimization) tool provides at least eight times faster optimization and an HTML5-based interface accessible from any internet browser or mobile device. Users can easily transfer cases to support different workflows. The unification of planning and scheduling data models allows the users to compare the plan and schedule envelop to look beyond the plant battery limits to include dock and pipeline operations. This important integration was a promise with the acquisition of Dock Scheduling System (DSS) last year. Forthcoming innovations may include the ability for users to build unified planning and scheduling models that can span more than one operating site.

Advanced Process Control Update
The company has introduced its third generation of multivariable predictive control technology, which it now calls Aspen DMC3 (formerly DMCplus). This platform update recognizes tuning of the economic objective function of an APC controller, which had been challenging for casual users. The new release of Smart Tune technology represents a major step forward in simplifying this process through the newly developed optimizer algorithm. The company believes that this capability can enable regular APC users to "behave like gurus." Smart Tune helps satisfy the shortage of highly skilled APC engineers and enables companies to build out tiered support programs. According to AspenTech, the new Aspen DMC3 makes it easier to build and maintain advanced process controllers. Customer presenter Sinopec sees Aspen DMC3 as a viable way to maintain 28 controllers at peak performance with only one APC engineer; something previously unheard of in the industry.  

Advancements in Aspen DMC3 version 8.8 included a calibrate mode that makes the older SmartStep application obsolete. User feedback was very positive and most operating companies recognized the need to make APC self-sufficient to appeal to the casual users. LP tuning is expensive due to the high level of expertise required and the iterative time-consuming process. Aspen DMC3 now breaks the objective function into smaller sub-groups with a redesigned operator display to help identify why process changes are occurring. Another new Aspen DMC3 feature, called Robust Control, makes the controller more resilient to unmeasured process disturbances. Viewed as somewhat counter-intuitive by customers, AspenTech believes the controller ultimately will perform satisfactorily even in less than ideal conditions.

Process-Specific Analytics Considered for the Future
Equipment analytics could help optimize assets by allowing users to predict unexpected outcomes and provide prescriptive guidance for operators or engineers. In the diagram below, AspenTech is considering a new, very important aspect to the current aspenONE Solution. The potential addition of a non-historian-centric database may provide context for both structured and unstructured data. This new "big data" element would support prescriptive and predictive analytics in conjunction with the IP.21 data time series data. For industries served by AspenTech, process analytics might allow users to examine process flow data from InfoPlus.21 historian with data from engineering such as that found within the plant schedule or from a piece of equipment in a HYSYS flow sheet. In the process simulation ecosystem, this may bring with it a multitude of opportunities to build out data sets outside the realm of typical process data stored in a process historian.

Possible Future Model for AspenTech Industry-Specific Process Analytics

Conclusion
Just six years ago, many customers experienced considerable angst when AspenTech created its new token-based, aspenONE licensing model. As ARC knows all too well, this also tended to disrupt the way the market is measured. Fast forward to today and 98 percent of users have transitioned to the new software model. This important step was part of the company's overall master plan to be able to deliver increased value to its process industry customers.

Although each customer presentation at the conference offered a positive view of the benefits of AspenTech solutions, ARC noted some subtle messages related to issues and challenges related to deploying and maintaining the required technology infrastructure. Looking ahead, you have to consider that predictive and prescriptive analytics and the associated database sophistication (spanning engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain) are not intended for the casual IT user or the faint of heart.

AspenTech's efforts to create an IT Steering Committee to simplify the deployment effort have helped somewhat, but may be aimed in the wrong direction if the company wants to see healthy growth in the adoption of advanced analytics. Presently over 50 percent of AspenTech customers order DVD software and install the software themselves, often using in-house IT resources. Instead, for deploying mission-critical enterprise software solutions such as these, ARC believes that AspenTech customers should consider engaging with a well-established global service provider or software system integrator with appropriate industry expertise and credentials. This would not only free up the customer's limited internal resources to be able to focus on improving business processes and the customer experience, but would also likely help ensure successful deployments.

Building out an ecosystem of AspenTech deployment partners for the company's solutions could accelerate adoption. The use of cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or even a private cloud infrastructure would be a key enabler to this ecosystem.

AspenTech, OPTIMIZE, aspenONE, AspenPlus, and Aspen DMCplus are trademarks or registered trademarks of Aspen Technology. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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Keywords: AspenTech, OPTIMIZE, Manufacturing, Advanced Process Control, Supply Chain, Process Engineering, Simulation, ARC Advisory Group.