Woodlands Dairy faced the challenge of integrating a second-hand powder plant from Denmark with an outdated control system into their existing operations. The control system was not suitable for the modifications required to adapt the process to Woodlands Dairy’s specifications. This prompted the company to consider how this expansion could be integrated with the rest of the site. The company needed a single platform that could integrate all the disparate plants on site while preserving past investments in expensive assets and legacy systems while making provision for future expansion. They also needed a centralized environment for process data logging which would allow them to analyze data in real-time and produce reports. The system also needed to comply with ISO 22000 standards and the project had to be completed without any interruptions to production.

Oceana, a new, medium-sized shipyard specializing in the production of AHTS, PSV and offshore supply vessels, faced several challenges in streamlining its ship production process. Accessing all the necessary information was difficult, and planning across all disciplines was unreliable. The production process was inefficient as people and systems worked separately, not together. The company also struggled with high production costs and assembly times. Furthermore, there were issues with material delivery, with incorrect materials being delivered to the wrong places at the wrong times.

KTY Engenharia, a company serving the oil & gas, energy, and infrastructure industries, was facing challenges in managing the vast amount of data involved in their engineering projects. The company was dealing with multiple projects concurrently, requiring regular contact with external partners and interoperability of tools used by all parties. The company was committed to continuously evolving and improving its working practices, and mastering the use of AVEVA tools was considered core to this strategy. One of the main concerns was the reliability and trustworthiness of information shared between documents. Large projects involved a complex interchange of documents and multidisciplinary information, where the slightest error could cause significant delays.

Chantier Davie (Davie), a diversified shipbuilder, produces various types of ships for both naval and commercial clients. The latest project, called ‘Resolve’, is the conversion of a 182.5-metre container ship into an auxiliary oil replenishment vessel for the Canadian Navy, to be completed in only 24 months, including design and delivery. To achieve the deadline for the complex rebuild, Davie had to evaluate existing tools and processes, to maximise efficiency across design, planning, supply chain and production. Before engaging with AVEVA ERM, Davie was facing several challenges in the planning and supply-chain domains. The challenges revolved around missing visibility of materials for planning, and around planning for the supply chain. Most of the systems used for supply chain and planning management were home-grown and supplemented with various Microsoft Excel sheets and Access databases.

Yamal LNG, a joint venture operating in the Russian arctic, faced several challenges in its project. The harsh climate made any setbacks dangerous and costly. The project involved many partners, making it difficult to keep documents up-to-date and approved by all. The need for manual checking of documents every 3-4 months was time-consuming and prone to errors. The process also precluded the simultaneous and common review of documents by teams which were geographically dispersed. The project's location within the Arctic Circle added an additional challenge, as even small delays could have a large impact on time scales if work is pushed into the arctic winter.

Cray Valley, a global leader in the manufacture of resins, composites and coatings, needed to update the control and monitoring of its three alkyd resin production manufacturing lines. The existing technology architecture had become obsolete and was no longer supported by the original developer. The aging PLC control system and SCADA infrastructure had no available technical support, access to spare parts or software updates, putting the entire manufacturing operation at risk. The challenge was to convert the plant to a new system capable of ensuring total visibility throughout the production process in a controlled and timely manner. The project also had to be implemented quickly to avoid disruption of manufacturing operations.

sia Abrasives Industries AG, one of the world's leading manufacturers of coated abrasives, was facing challenges with its outdated and inconsistent systems. The lack of connection between the controls of the individual production units made the planning of various production processes and the management of the machines' setup highly laborious and inefficient. Moreover, manufacturing data was administered via different, non-compatible systems, leading to errors caused by media conversions. As process data accumulated locally, significant efforts had to be made for consistent quality control due to the lack of a common database. The company decided to introduce an extensive automation solution that facilitates production control and reporting.

Auto-Bake, a producer of commercial machinery for the baking industry, was faced with the challenge of creating a fast yet secure production system. They aimed to design a vertical oven with a reduced footprint and increased production flexibility. The company needed an interface that would work equally well with both Rockwell Automation and Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLCs). They were also looking for an independent supplier of touch panels to replace some proprietary technologies that had become outdated. The company markets its products worldwide and thus needed to support numerous local languages.

Bayer CropScience AG, a subsidiary of Bayer AG, is a leading innovator in the fields of crop protection, nonagricultural pest management, seeds and plant biotechnologies. The company has invested nearly 10 million euro at La Dargoire over the last two years to provide the existing laboratories with state-of-the-art equipment. The Biology department has benefitted from this investment with the creation of a new, fully-robotized system for large-scale testing of the effectiveness of new molecules on plant diseases. The FROGSS (Fungicide Rotating Greenhouse Spraying System) project was born. Its functional scope concerning the steering monitoring solution remains to be defined. The company requested a tool that was able to change easily according to needs identified during the course of the project, without jeopardizing what already existed. Their options were quickly narrowed to a Wonderware solution which offered a modular and open architecture based on market standards.

Ash Grove Cement Company, the fifth largest cement manufacturer in the United States, was facing the challenge of maximizing profit in a highly cost-competitive market. The company needed to continuously innovate and find better ways to balance both availability and utilization of its production assets. This challenge was compounded by having to develop a standardized solution that worked for each of its nine separate production facilities. The company's long-term goal was to automate maintenance data collection at each of its facilities for a well-defined enterprise asset management process to support equipment performance reliability while interfacing with its financial software, JD Edwards One World. They needed a system that they could implement to improve operations, with the scalability to contribute to sustainable development.

The Water and Wastewater Division of Toronto Works and Emergency Services (WES) was operating with outdated preventive maintenance and inventory programs that were developed internally. Each facility had its own version of these programs, and the functionality was very limited. The division was spending most of its time in a reactive maintenance mode, which was identified as a productivity gap. The division aimed to shift towards a more proactive maintenance approach, which required advanced business tools and information systems.The division was involved in a broad improvement initiative called the Works Best Practices Program (WBPP). The WBPP aimed to develop a highly efficient organizational structure through the application of redesigned work practices and the acquisition of new process control and information systems. An Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system with full maintenance, inventory, and purchasing functionality was identified as a key component of the WBPP applications architecture.

Western Refining, an independent crude oil refiner and marketer of refined products throughout the Southwest, was using an aging legacy system for asset management. The system, which came with the purchase of the El Paso refinery and terminal assets from Chevron Texaco, promised powerful functionality to automate maintenance, purchasing, inventory, and related accounts payable. However, it was of an earlier generation and was deemed too complex, cumbersome, and expensive to maintain. The company felt they were missing out on opportunities to cut costs and improve efficiency. The functionality was probably there, but they just couldn’t get at it easily. Western Refining’s changing business needs prompted an evaluation of asset management system options.

Seminole County Water Division was facing the challenge of ensuring the safety of the more than 46 million gallons of water produced each day. The County had to keep an operator 24 hours a day at a SCADA desk or waiting for alarms to come in so people could be called or paged out. The County needed a better method to access data from the historian and communicate it to operators in the field. The department realised it needed to have a more mobile way of managing plant facilities and communicating among plant managers by making plant operations data more mobile so share in the field.

Vista Projects, a Canada-based engineering firm, was facing challenges with their traditional approach to engineering. Their old conventional spreadsheet approach was unreliable and prone to errors. The company was also dealing with silos of activity and functions, which made it difficult to expedite projects. They were commissioned by a major Canadian oil & gas producer to deliver the FEED for a large-scale, greenfield, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) facility. The client wanted close collaboration with Vista to ensure that a compressed engineering schedule could be met and that data accuracy, transparency and security would be best in class.

NIIK, a leading engineering company in Russia, was facing challenges in improving change management across departments and growing visibility of processes at the design supervision stage. Each change in a project required collaboration and coordination across multiple teams and disciplines. The existing working standards were failing to support the company’s ambitious goals and were not fit for purpose for a 21st-century industry leader. The process of updating new information from different design departments was holding up progress and pushing back delivery dates. There were misunderstandings between the design and procurement functions, leading to lost time, impacts on the bottom line, and implications for safety.

BLOM Maritime, a global organization offering 3D laser scanning, metrology, and engineering services, faced several challenges. The company had to deal with large amounts of data that demanded accuracy. They also needed fast and detailed digital visualizations of physical assets. The company aimed to increase collaboration, incorporate parameterized design, integrate engineering and design, improve efficiency, and reduce design time. However, the vast amount of laser-scanned data posed a challenge on how to exploit it to provide an accurate and trustworthy digital asset of the physical asset scanned, which can then be used as an engineering design platform.

Ascend Performance Materials, a global leader in the production of Nylon 6,6, was facing challenges in tracking data to ensure production efficiency and product quality. There was a lack of process consistency throughout the plants. The company was not leveraging modern technology to optimize its operations. Ascend operations had to access multiple software systems to manage day-to-day operations in an effective and secure manner. These systems generated large sets of data which contained critical information pertaining to management systems, planning and cost information in business systems and energy consumption. As a result, Ascend management was challenged with creating relevant reports reflecting performance measures in overall context of their operational process. The company’s previous process entailed collecting and analysing data manually which was not effective, since the information collected was generated after the fact, and was too complex for collaborative use across the organisation.

Vectren Corporation, a $2 billion utility company based in Evansville, Indiana, provides electricity or natural gas to nearly two-thirds of Indiana and 16 counties in Ohio. The company operates two power plants, which together use five coal-fired units and six gas turbines to produce about 1,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Keeping these plants running continuously and efficiently is vital to Vectren’s mission to serve customers. Vectren is also in the wholesale market for power sales where availability has tremendous financial implications. The company's challenge was to reduce its overall operations, maintenance, and capital spending, while keeping the availability high. As a key part of its strategy for meeting this challenge, Vectren management set out to eliminate inefficiencies in scheduling maintenance, ordering parts and keeping track of completed work.

Apply Sørco, a Norwegian engineering company, faced challenges in winning new contracts due to the existing time-consuming training process and the excessive amount of administrative work. Major clients demanded substantially lower costs, putting pressure on the company to reduce their prices and spend fewer man-hours per task. The company's major clients on the Norwegian continental shelf mandate their subcontractors to deliver data and information using AVEVA software, and the deliverables vary from client to client. The integration of these was not optimal, as it required numerous mouse-clicks, and the engineers had to switch between different software packages.

Baxter S.A., a global diversified healthcare company, needed to revise its manufacturing facility processes to incorporate automation methods into a new production line. The new automation system needed to assist Baxter in achieving U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 21 CFR Part 11 compliance regulations. The automation system selected for the new Baxter production line had to be fully compatible with Baxter’s existing architecture and systems. The company required that the new system integrate Profibus-connected smart sensors into the new manufacturing line process. Production management had to be centralised and include reporting, analysis, traceability and performance monitoring to adhere to FDA 21 CFR Part 11 regulations as well as European compliance standards.

MMG Limited, a global mining company, was seeking to implement a standardised Asset Utilisation solution across all its operational sites. The solution needed to be flexible enough to adapt to the local operating conditions of each mine, while also providing a standardised asset utilisation data that they could analyse in real-time. The company wanted to have the capability to drill-down to the root-cause of any equipment asset that was exhibiting less than perfect utilisation, in order to drive continuous improvement through the business. The new system and processes had to be readily accepted by users everywhere, and this had to be achieved in a single sign-on environment compatible with existing systems.

The Southern Mississippi Electric Power Association (SMEPA) was facing a challenge of improving the heat rate and boiler efficiency while maintaining low NOx emissions at their R.D. Morrow Generating Station. The station utilizes two parallel boiler-turbine units with a capacity of 204 MW at 2400 psig. The fuel is pulverized coal from three Riley doubleend ball tube mills fed by six Stock Gravimetric feeders. The objective was to determine the most profitable operating point for the boiler and mills, as defined by a set of values for the controlled and manipulated variables in the process model.