Progress Through Partnership

A recap of the Seeq Conneqt Regional Roadshow - Philadelphia

If you don’t use technology to bring your costs down, it doesn’t matter who you are and what you make. You’re going to go the way of Blockbuster.

– Sanofi Head of Data Science, Peter Bernsdorf.

In the manufacturing environment, technology adoption can be a challenge, particularly when the status quo is proven to be safe, adequate, and, of particular relevance to this northeast audience, compliant. However, failure to keep up with technology will ultimately lead to failure of the organization amongst tightening regulations and over-saturated markets.  

In October, our Conneqt Regional Roadshow in Philadelphia brought together major chemicals, pharmaceuticals, MMM, utilities, and energy industry players alongside our cloud, technology, system integration (SI), and services partners. The result: A collection of learnings and best practices for how advanced analytics can drive operational excellence and sustainability initiatives.

 

 

 

Here are some key highlights:

Seeq partnerships reduce friction  

Movers and shakers in manufacturing organizations will encounter all types of friction when trying to implement and gain acceptance of new technologies. Here’s your go-to guide for which types of Seeq partners can help with each type of friction.

• Procurement friction? Seeq cloud partners can help streamline the purchase by transacting through their marketplaces with their Ts&Cs, and draw down on committed spend with your cloud provider. 
• Regional friction? Seeq global services partners will make sure training and support are offered in the language and time zone preferred by your site teams.  
• IT friction? Seeq technology partners ensure seamless integration between Seeq and commonly used historians and other time-series systems of record. Our systems integrator partners ensure any data source you can dream up has a clear and performant flow to Seeq. 
• Adoption friction? Seeq global services partners can act as an extension of your workforce, helping to train, support, execute, and amplify the impact of use cases across your organization.  
• Product friction? Seeq manufacturing industry partners (also known as our 250+ world-class customers) are best at figuring out what our products need. Some Seeq products, solutions, add-ons, and features spurred out of partnerships with our customers include Industrial Enterprise Monitoring, Process Health Solution, OEE, and Compare View.  

 

A strong industrial data foundation is at the heart of every success story

AspenTech DataWorks Director of Partnerships, Stephane Rioux, shared some of the current and in-progress integrations between their data storage solutions and Seeq advanced analytics. Connectors to IP21 and Inmation are available now. Stephane also shared that the native connector to Aspen Production Record Manager (APRM) is coming very soon – a much-anticipated announcement for some in the room. Stay tuned for more updates on the integration roadmap, including calculation writeback and content publishing. 

Data must be usable, and useful

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is eliminating outsourcing of analysis by empowering its people, and bringing the right data, to the right people at the right time, with the right context. Shyam Mudiraj, Lead Data Scientist, shared how Seeq is empowering his team to solve challenges in the general areas of process development, real-time monitoring, and process transmittance. This ignited conversations around the room about the criticality of tech transfer and scale-up to decrease time to market, who is using Seeq for this, and how.  

Shashank Acharya, Process Development Engineer, exemplified the types of outcomes being achieved by Regeneron’s SMEs and shared how Seeq is used to track noise in the Dissolved Oxygen (DO) meters in their bioreactors. Formula functions purpose-built for this were deployed across a simple asset tree designed to scale this use case. The resultant dashboard contains a treemap, color-categorized by the values of the noise metric, highlighting bad actor DO tags to the people who can take action. 

Technology is the fuel, but people are the spark

Chemours realized that many of their recent value-added process improvement opportunities had something in common. Each of the opportunities had been identified and then justified using Seeq self-service analytics. Graham Pratt, VP Digital and Data Analytics Leader, shared the five drivers of Chemours’ digital and data analytics journey, putting emphasis on self-service analytics and the “Digitally Upskilled Workforce.” Chemours has used on-the-job, social, and traditional learning strategies to build an 800+ person analytics community of practice. Members of that community are using Seeq to solve key use cases, including: 

• Inventory transparency 
• Rapid root cause analysis 
• Real-time monitoring 
• Environmental alerts 

Batch optimization goes beyond batch cycle time 

Jeff Classen, Principal Solution Architect – Digital Transformation, at Seeq partner Zaether has been searching for the golden batch for decades. As a digital consultancy working in the life sciences space, much of Zaether’s work focuses on optimizing batch processes, managing tech transfer, and getting products to market faster. Their recipe for getting as close as can be to the true golden batch? 

1. Cycle Time Analysis to locate unexpectedly long-duration phases 
2. Statistical Process Control (SPC) visualizations and notifications based on established run rules 
3. Batch SPC + Multivariate SPC 
4. Predictive Modeling to provide in-batch guidance to maintain quality 
5. Batch APC inching toward closed-loop control and a “lights out” plant 

 

Seeq product roadmap: radical refinement + new use cases

Senior Analytics Engineer Katie Pintar delivered a forward-looking presentation, including how Seeq is responding to the innovative and boundary-pushing ideas of our customers, turning the GenAI hype to productive reality, and the endless quest for the perfect UI/UX.

Here are a few of the worst-kept secrets at Seeq: 

1. Data sharing: once impossible > then unlikely > now, sign me up!
   Two use cases presented by Marathon Petroleum and Honeywell UOP at Conneqt 2023 sparked internal conversation about what would be required to enable simpler, secure sharing of data between companies and their vendors, licensors and their customers, and product development companies and their contract manufacturers. New features in R62+ are making this peer-to-peer data sharing even easier. 
2. But I really need to monitor all 40,000+ of these conditions
   Email is not the answer. Seeq’s decision support workflow solution is! Flint Hills Resources’ presentation from Conneqt 2023 gets into the details of how they monitor thousands of conditions simultaneously without going crazy.
3. Where there’s a will, there’s an Add-on
   Seeq extensibility starts with a customer and a problem. What began as an OEE solution for a global pharmaceutical company has morphed into a Reformer Regen Delay Tracker at Marathon Petroleum, boasting a dramatic 90% time savings compared to legacy tools. Other highlights included the Seeq-AE-developed product-splitter Add-on, accelerating analyses that must be done relative to specific products, and Seeq’s first AI assistant, making Add-on development a no-coding-required activity.  

Huge thank you to all our manufacturing, cloud, technology, services, and system integrators partners for helping to make our Philadelphia roadshow a success. Check out our events page to see when Seeq is coming to a town near you!

And if you are ready to discuss how Seeq can improve your operations, please contact us to speak with one of our industry experts and schedule a demo today.