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Overview
At the recent OSIsoft PI World conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, Lonza’s Global Operational Technology Manager, Dr. Tobias Merz gave an excellent presentation describing the Lonza Specialty Ingredients segment’s journey to obtain actionable, information-based insights from its data.
Lonza Specialty Ingredients focuses on microbial control for personal care as well as for protecting homes, schools, workplaces and environment from mold and other potential pathogens. It also offers performance intermediates and chemicals, custom development and manufacturing and composites to support the electronics, aerospace, food, and agrochemical industries.
The technology solution, which combines OSIsoft PI System data with Seeq’s advanced analytics, provides the company’s experts with 24/7 access to plant performance, and enables them to run statistical analysis, create models for predictive analytics, compare batches, and present static and update insights in Seeq dashboards. More than 530 users companywide (engineers, bio technologists, chemists, scientists, managers, and those from other departments) now have access to these capabilities. According to the company, the resulting benefits include “massive” time savings, improved data sharing and enhanced collaboration, improved productivity, and better product quality.
Data Maturity Assessment
To get a better understanding of how the company was using its manufacturing data, it completed a data usage maturity assessment at its major life science industry (LSI) manufacturing sites in 2017. The assessment reviewed what different sites were doing with their process data or historians, if process data was available, if they had visualization tools, and if they were doing analytics on the data.
The results of the assessment were color coded by site (shown on the graph). Red dots indicate that either no data was available, that the sites don’t use the data, or don’t know that they have it. Yellow dots indicate that the PI system is available, but the site didn’t do a lot with the data. Green dots indicate the sites that were more active in using OSIsoft PI Vision or PI ProcessBook for data visualization. The team determined that none of the sites were doing advanced analytics on the data when they began the assessment in 2016.
Operations Challenges
Lonza’s central hub for subject matter experts (SMEs) is in Switzerland. The SMEs have expertise in areas such as thermal separation, fermentation, particle technology, formulation, and PAT (process analytical technology). Their mission is to collaborate with production to help solve complex problems. The company determined that by providing the SMEs with a better understanding of the information at the different sites through real-time dashboards, historical data reports, and advanced analytic tools it could improve collaboration companywide and empower the people using the data from the OSIsoft PI system. The SMEs could support the local production sites remotely to help them find and detect potential optimization opportunities.
Digitalization Maturity for Operational Improvements
Dr. Merz and his team determined that to make operational improvements the company needed to move away from Excel spreadsheets and digitalize the data using its PI System collaborative infrastructure. This 
would enable them to combine people, processes, and technology and help the SME Hub experts improve production.
Steps to Digitalization
The first maturity stage for the digitalization roadmap was to be able to get the data from each site to evaluate the current installed base and then to connect the data to the PI System. The second stage was to be able to visualize each sites’ assets and the process. Currently, the company is focused on stage 2; making sense of the data and obtaining actionable insights.
Future stages will be to improve process understanding from the data, visualize the data trends, model the process, and use more advanced process control. Lonza’s ultimate vision is to have autonomous production that includes integrated operations in the value chain, from logistics to warehousing to supply chain to inventory on a global basis.
The team worked with each site to determine their specific challenges or pain points and what data analytics technology or capabilities would be needed to eliminate those site-specific pain points. These varied depending on the respective sites’ data maturity level.
The team found a large number of spreadsheets being used in production at different sites, the majority dedicated to detecting batch phases or other specific information. Many of the original Excel owners had retired, making it difficult to support many of these spreadsheets.
They also evaluated different visualization requirements to be implemented. The dashboards needed varied from batch phase recognition based on PI tags; to SPC tables; to automatic recognition of unit operations; to multi-batch alignment and comparisons; to monitoring setpoint variations, calculating batch durations, and more.
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Keywords: Digital Manufacturing, Advanced Analytics, Pharmaceutical, Biotech, Lonza, Seeq, OSIsoft PI, ARC Advisory Group.