Dow Makes Data Work

The theme of the recent 2015 ARC European Forum in Amsterdam, "The Information Driven Enterprise in a Connected World," was intended to help develop some clarity over emerging related concepts such as Industrie 4.0, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).  At the Forum, we heard several compelling use cases about how the application of these concepts can deliver tangible benefits in real-world industrial production.  The Dow Chemical journey towards making data work for them, rather than the opposite, is one of them.

In their compelling presentation, Lloyd Colegrove and his team from the Dow Analytical Technology Center stated that the company currently often underuses, misuses, or misinterprets much data.  Dr. Colegrove argued that when put in a much wider context, analyzed automatically, presented attractively, and enabled to act on weak signals, data provides "wisdom" that can guide the company.  In this manner, the data can help "justify actions to fix, guide actions to improve, and prescribe actions to make breakthrough changes."

Dow Chemical partnered with Northwest Analytics to use that company's Focus EMI solution to take in data from appropriate data sources, apply analytics to predict trends based on newly discovered relationships, and present results to all levels in the company for strategic, tactical, and real-time purposes. The company went through a culture change.

Dr. Colegrove illustrated this with a case in which guessing and post-mortem analysis after a plant trip was replaced by acting upon an analytics-fueled dashboard to be able to make the right operating decisions in time to prevent equipment degradation.

He showed how some plants gradually improved performance, moving from dashboards with many red indicators to those with mostly green indicators.  The problem wasn't that the information was not available before, it just was not either given the right focus, or resources were lacking to analyze the information.  In the next stages of the project, Dow plans to roll out the systems to other business units, continue to build on its knowledge base, expand the use of collaboration, and continue to "develop, partner, and dream."

In an upcoming Insight, we will report on another industrial data analytics use case, and provide comments and analysis.

​​Keywords: ARC European Forum 2015, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Analytics, Dow Chemical, Northwest Analytics