Process Simulation Will Continue To Move To The Cloud

While attending a recent Aspentech Optimize software conference  - I happened to have the opportunity to meet a process engineer who was a user of process simulation software. Our meeting was quite random - the kind of meeting when you are holding a plate full of food and you look for the empty seat at a round table in a crowded room. Aspentech conferences provide a great venue for end users to share success stories in the area of  process simulation  (the kind of process simulation that is used for  the process design and the optimization of a plant or facility, or operator training)

I introduced myself extended my hand and we exchanged business cards. This engineer seemed intrigued that I was an Analyst, and attending technical conferences was part of my regular job. Our conversation quickly evolved into pain points observed with engineering software. Although he was cordial and polite, he began to describe what was wrong with most engineering simulation. There seemed to be evidence of a "burning platform", or at least observed from his role as Process Engineer.  In change management circles a "burning platform" is a term used to describe an extremely urgent or compelling business situation in order to convey, in the strongest terms, the need for change.

What I learned from our conversation was this process engineer - although satisfied with the ability of the simulation software to perform the task, was hampered by the limitations of corporate IT infrastructure and tools. Most corporate IT or Shared services tend to provision desktop and laptop materials in a similar manner. In fact, if you join a company the day you start your job - you likely get the corporate standard image. This typical PC has most necessary drivers and software and enough memory and hard disk for most applications. Running a computing-resource-intensive engineering simulation on a laptop,  however, is not a typical enterprise application. Cloud services and deployment fixes theses problems associated with infrastructure.

One of the conference presenters David Vickery from Dow Chemical’s Engineering Solutions Technology Center presented his company’s view of using simulation  solutions. Dow was an early adopter of modern simulation tools. Mr. Vickery believes 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).

Also noted as this conference - there is a huge shift in the user base and customer expectations are changing. Forty percent of simulation users are brand new while 60 percent are older than age 45. As my colleague Dick Hill wrote in his article about next generation workforce problems, workers expectations about where they work and the tools they use are different than previous generations.