Customer Stories

For almost 90 years, Dérivés Résiniques et Terpeniques (DRT) has manufactured two pine resin extracts: turpentine and rosin. The extracts are utilized by blue chip international brands that produce everything from cosmetics and perfume to adhesives, rubber tires, chewing gum, and food supplements. Before adopting OSIsoft’s data infrastructure, production engineers at DRT relied on manual data entry, control room phone calls and data collection with spreadsheets to determine the effectiveness of their equipment. Today, the PI System is used at four different plants and monitors over 15,000 data streams from DRT’s assets, such as its steam generators and product distillation columns.

For utility companies, end-of-month reporting periods can be stressful. Management waits impatiently to receive the closing reports with KPIs from the previous month’s accounting cycle. The data is often incomplete and not up-to-date, and those responsible for the reports spend days preparing labor-intensive, manual reports. Now imagine the added pressure of being the world’s number one independent power producer, with over 115 gigawatts of installed capacity and millions of customers relying on your business to run reliably and efficiently. That’s precisely the kind of frustrating situation ENGIE, a French multinational electric utility company, faced each month before it automated its business management process with the help of OSIsoft’s PI System.

A cooperative of starch potato growers with a 100 years of history, Avebe is a niche player that breaks down its product into starches and proteins, which are used as raw materials in food and industrial markets like pulp and paper, adhesives and textiles. Avebe’s competitive advantage depends on production plants that the company runs in the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. Recently, the cooperative started facing a dual challenge: a growing “technology storm” – demanding greater efficiency and compliance with increasingly complex regulations – and the aging workforce, with 20% of employees due to retire within five years. The company’s management recognized that it was time to embark on a journey of digital transformation and build a Factory 4.0 manufacturing platform to put real-time data analytics tools into the hands of its personnel.