Dow, a company that provides innovative and sustainable solutions for industries such as packaging, infrastructure, mobility and consumer applications, is using data to reduce the company's operating costs with solutions from Microsoft. The company seeks to aggregate and integrate data in silos to guide decision-making at all levels of its business.
“Digital tools have helped us drive our competitive advantage and continue to elevate our position in the industry,” says Billy Bardin, Director of Global Digitization at Dow. The company works with strategic partners to maximize the potential of these technologies. This strategy adds long-term value while helping the company stay current. “It's not about chasing technology,” says Clark Dressen, senior director of Information Systems at Dow. "It's about finding opportunities to change the way we work, understanding the value this opportunity can deliver to our business, and then selecting the right innovative technology to deliver that value."
Dow began exploring remote plant monitoring technologies as early as 2011. In 2014, the company took an Industry 4.0 approach, investing in interconnectivity, automation, machine learning and real-time data. This initiative encompassed data digitization and analytics, employee experience improvements, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and greater adoption of digital and physical automation.
Data quality and availability were critical to this effort. However, much of the data that Dow historically collected was isolated and relatively difficult to access. The company wanted a comprehensive solution for data ingestion and integration with the ability to group, cleanse, organize and store the data in an easily accessible format. “We have a lot of sensors in the field that capture vast amounts of process, equipment and engineering data,” says Bardin. “We needed to give engineers and operators in the manufacturing environment access to this data in real time so they could make more informed decisions faster.”
With a focus on digital interconnectivity, Dow analyzed various architectures, platforms and ways of organizing and characterizing data and identified Microsoft Azure as a potential cloud solution. “Microsoft offered a portfolio of products with a competitive advantage through Azure and its capabilities,” says Bardin. As one of the most strategic partners in Microsoft's global alliance, Accenture provided expertise to the overall program, combining the power of three world-leading organizations.
After meeting with representatives from Microsoft and Accenture to develop and complete a field test of the potential solution set and further refine the value proposition for digital manufacturing, the Dow team presented the effort as part of an overall initiative digital acceleration program that received support from the company's executive leadership and Board of Directors. The plans outlined a purposeful extension of data interconnectivity and digital transformation across Dow.
Building and testing a new data architecture
Dow aggregated data from multiple engineering, maintenance, and operations sources onto a cloud-hosted platform on Azure. The company could then connect employees to data through cloud-connected applications and services, integrating elements from multiple data sources into a single data hub in Azure, facilitating analytics capabilities. Now, the company can use the integrated data to drive different applications under development.
Dow also seeks to provide quick visualization and dashboards at all levels of your organization. Using Microsoft Power BI, company employees can make decisions based on real-time analytics. For device management, the team used Microsoft Intune to control who has access to devices and what they can access. The company also uses Azure Kubernetes Service for fast and easy application development and deployment in the cloud.
proving the worth
The Dow team began building the infrastructure and planning critical field testing to evaluate the new platform in 2020. “We had to prove that we could use these technologies in a real-time production environment and summarize the result so we could demonstrate the value to launch the program,” says Maulik Patel, Senior Director of IT and Operational Technology at Dow.
After successful field testing, Patel's team developed a plan for full scale implementation at the company's largest and most integrated manufacturing site in Texas and then into its global manufacturing ecosystem. “We were able to scale the same solution at other locations in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region,” says Patel.
Dow relied on Microsoft, Accenture and several other strategic partners to enhance the experience of Dow employees by working with their existing platform and architecture to accelerate the pace of the project. “We're doing very rapid deployment to many different locations,” says Patel. “We support Microsoft's guidance in developing the Azure architecture and increasing our technical resources so that we can meet accelerated deadlines and support the solution in the future.”
Realizing the value of expanded interconnectivity and data access
Dow is rolling out the solution across the enterprise and has already delivered measurable improvements in several areas. “Based on our Azure data, analytics, and application infrastructure, we're seeing improvements in equipment uptime, production efficiency, and employee collaboration,” says Dressen. “The power of this solution is apparent across the enterprise, facilitating everything from better logistics to streamlined work scheduling, impacting the bottom line.”
Digital workflows bring Dow greater flexibility and agility to respond to changes and disruptions. “Using Azure as a backend along with the mobile connected field professional platform, we have turned some manual and paper-based processes into digital procedures, which helps us increase information visibility and simplify work practices,” says Dressen. . “For example, when there is an issue, an employee can take a photo and add it to the case record for others to see, rather than just using written text. It gives us more context to make better decisions.”
Automation is simplifying day-to-day work across the company's manufacturing facilities. “If you see an anomaly, you can convert it to a field maintenance notification instead of going back to your desk,” says Patel. “It's easy to capture the relevant information and trigger maintenance workflows instantly. The digital solutions we build are changing the way we work.”
Using newly deployed industrial-grade mobile devices running Windows 10, employees can collaborate from anywhere using voice and video meetings and get relevant information whenever they need it. “We are significantly improving our maintenance and operations workflow,” says Patel. “We also increased our asset utilization and reduced operating costs. We even have a better way to manage supplier performance.”
Achieving a digital manufacturing vision with Microsoft
Dow leveraged Microsoft's technology and engagement—aspects that the team hopes will grow in the future. “Microsoft will play a critical role in our scalability and our ability to keep up with technology, making it easier to achieve our digital vision for manufacturing,” says Patel.
Dow also appreciated Microsoft's readiness to bring in its top experts when problems arose during the build. “Microsoft's ability to bring experience to bear on challenging problems is critical as we continue to increase our technology transformation across our manufacturing environment and across the enterprise as a whole,” says Bardin.
Accelerating innovation for the future
“While we are turning this new data architecture into a reality, we continue to see opportunities to make improvements – things like developing common data models and industry standards – as well as ways to speed up data cleansing and integration and generally make the data available to applications. wider,” says Dressen.
The Dow team plans to continue streamlining and simplifying current processes as it expands its deployment globally. Dow also plans to deepen its use of AI, machine learning and automation as it works to achieve its vision of being the world's most innovative, customer-centric, inclusive and sustainable materials science company.
Based on our Azure data, analytics, and application infrastructure, we are seeing improvements in equipment uptime, production efficiency, and employee collaboration. The power of this solution is evident throughout the company, facilitating everything from better logistics to simplified work scheduling, with an impact on results.
