Covestro Uses Remote Services

Pittsburgh-based polymer manufacturer Covestro LLC is using Emerson technologies to help it achieve its goals of minimizing risk and improving uptime at nine high-utilization plants. Emerson will provide remote monitoring and predictive maintenance.

One guy in an audience of reliability and maintenance professionals raised a hand with a question during one of my talks on networks, protocols, and the like. “The engineers tell us that these things don’t work, so we should just forget about all that stuff.”

That happened to me only a few years ago. Since then, we in the industry have written thousands of words about the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), data, information, and analytics. Still, I get the question, “Does it really work? Is anyone using IIoT and receiving benefits?”

The following case study recently reached me. It demonstrates that, yes, there is something in all of this technology that will provide great benefits to manufacturers and producers.

Covestro LLC, Pittsburgh (covestro.us/en), one of the world’s largest polymer companies, selected Emerson Automation, St. Louis (emerson.com), to provide IIoT technologies to help it achieve its goals of minimizing risk and improving uptime at nine high-utilization plants. As part of the $14-million, 5-yr. contract, Emerson will provide remote monitoring and predictive maintenance to help Covestro improve production, safety, and reliability.

Emerson will remotely monitor and maintain 40 of its DeltaV distributed-control systems at Covestro plants in China, the U.S., and Germany. Remote teams at Emerson’s Innovation Center in Austin, TX, will monitor and provide best-practices maintenance strategies for local Emerson teams to implement at each Covestro plant.

“By collaborating with Emerson to stay proactive about plant availability, we can drive toward always-on production and continue to satisfy customers in our high-demand market,” said Klaus Schaefer, chief technical officer, Covestro.

The Emerson-Covestro agreement reflects an emerging business model in industry, where manufacturers rely on a strategic supplier’s software solutions and deep automation expertise to monitor and execute maintenance, equipment health, and/or energy-management programs, allowing customers to focus their attention on critical operating functions that drive plant performance.

Book Tip

In my career in manufacturing and management, I’ve found working with the people side of automation projects to be more important than the technology side. A few of my projects “went south” because the workers were so suspicious of their supervisors that they wouldn’t use my automation.

In Edgar H. Schein’s book, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (2013, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Oakland, CA, bkconnection.com), Schein states that many people would rather fail than admit their dependency on another person by asking a subordinate or someone to provide needed information. The art of humble inquiry slows us down so that we can ask and listen. He says, “I find the biggest mistakes I make and the biggest risks I run all result from mindless hurrying.” This is a skill that will pay big dividends. EP

Contributing editor Gary Mintchell is an industrial-technology subject- matter expert. He can be reached at gmintchell@efficientplantmag.com.