Customer Stories

Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical Company manufactures a variety of materials, chemicals, and fibers at about 50 sites worldwide. At its Tennessee plant, Eastman’s Process Analytics Group is recently embarking on a major digital transformation project, integrating PI System data with data sources and analytical tools from Microsoft Power BI to create a central system for overseeing more than 1300 process analyzers.

In 2013, UC Davis as part of the University of California system had an ambitious goal: Net zero greenhouse gas emissions from the campus’s building and vehicle fleet by 2025. University of California, Davis was the first major university to pledge carbon neutrality, and with more than 1,000 buildings comprising a total of 11.3 million square feet, it’s a high bar to clear. In early steps toward carbon neutrality, the university embarked on a few large projects with clear benefits, retrofitting large plants and buildings to operate more efficiently. But when the obvious projects had been tackled, UC Davis turned to the PI System to identify opportunities for using data to drive more efficient use of resources.

It’s late on a Friday night in San Diego and Max, a controller you might imagine working in the operations control center (OCC) for EDF Renewables, has his eyes full of lights. He scans multiple control screens displaying the status of all the company’s wind turbines scattered across North America. A glance at one screen reveals that a few turbines at a site in Canada are down. After Max realizes he cannot reset the turbines remotely, a fraught but inevitable question arises: should he call out an after-hours maintenance crew, or not? Every hour a turbine is down means more lost revenue. Max knows there is a potentially huge amount of money on the line. But how much? And how much lost potential revenue merits a call-out? If only OCC controllers like Max had data to help answer such questions, the savings could be enormous.