Specialty chemicals have become an indispensable part of the modern world. They play crucial roles in various sectors and industries that range from food & beverage to automotive and construction. Among the companies leading the way in the specialty chemicals market is the Perstorp Group. With a history spanning 140 years, the company has established itself as a world leader in several segments, such as resins & coatings, engineered fluids and animal nutrition.
But as the company continued to grow and expand globally, it faced a challenge in managing technical information across its production sites.
Different groups of users, from engineers to maintenance and operations staff, needed quick access to relevant information and documents, such as handover documentation, technical drawings, equipment information or maintenance reports. Yet, this information was managed differently across production sites, leading to inefficiencies and time-consuming efforts to retrieve it.
A next-generation solution that makes lifecycle information readily accessible
To tackle this challenge and create a strong foundation for technical information management at future sites, Perstorp embarked on a global strategic initiative. A central focus of this initiative was to unify project and operations data to maximize efficiency.
On the operations side, the goal was to provide quick and accurate access to information across the entire lifecycle within a single-pane-of-glass interface. In addition, this interface had to be role-based to meet the needs of various groups of users, such as plant management, operations, and reliability and maintenance engineers.
The platform was also meant to enable the project organization - for example, by providing a system to create new documentation and tags, modify existing ones, and move them back and forth between projects and as-built.
Perstorp found that InConcert Core (formerly HxGN SDx) provided the best solution to meet these objectives within a single platform.
In the opinion of Tor Lindström, Perstorp’s Director of Asset Integrity, OnConcert Core's modern, web-based model also seemed a step ahead of its application-based competitors and better matched Perstorp’s needs. The fact that Octave’s solutions could work seamlessly with SAP’s was also a strong positive.
Complex migrations require agile solutions
Perstorp started with a pilot implementation in one of its smaller sites in 2020. After the success of this first phase, InConcert Core was deployed at one of the company’s largest existing sites, located in Southern Sweden. In addition, the solution was used from the start for a greenfield project in India.
For brownfield projects, migrating all the technical information required to modify, operate and maintain a plant represented a challenge. In addition, some of that information was typically stored in unintelligent document formats and needed to be “smartified” and contextualized.
To successfully accomplish this task, Perstorp could rely on Octave teams’ product expertise and willingness to tailor their ways of working to meet the need of the project. “Octave supported us with the continuous development of the system and additional configuration. Their team was very knowledgeable, and they supported us in an agile and iterative way, which supported our step-by-step adoption. It has certainly been a good collaboration,” Tor Lindström confirms.
From better information management to Smart Digital Reality
Three years later, the benefits of implementing InConcert Core are clear.
The new solution provides Perstorp teams with a single master location to find all the lifecycle information previously stored in different repositories. As a result, access is faster, and the information is more comprehensive and accurate. Over time, this translates to increased efficiency and significant time savings.
As any major change, moving from a paper-based system to InConcert Core has its challenges, Tor Lindström underlines.
“Our collaboration with Octave has been a very good one. InConcert Legacy fulfills our needs for both data and project management - and Octave’s teams are very knowledgeable and support us in an agile and iterative way that fits our step-by-step adoption.” Tor Lindström, Director of Asset Integrity at Perstorp.
For example, engineers used to rely on physical binders that contained logical sequences of drawings. Moving to an object-oriented solution, where designs are represented as collections of digital objects with properties and behaviors, requires a different thinking process and retrieving information can initially entail a learning curve.
But, over time, this approach yields significant benefits: “we haven’t solved everything yet - but in many areas at stake, such as core documentation or P&ID, it has become much easier to find the right information than before. Not only is it clear where everything is, but the information is interconnected to relate to equipment and tags, which is very efficient. And due to the integration with SAP, it is easy to interface information with InConcert Core,” Tor Lindström notes.
For Jens Olav Nordanger, Senior Account Manager at Octave, Perstorp is leading the way in demonstrating the advantages that industrial companies can gain from Smart Digital Reality: “by digitizing existing processes, collecting data throughout the asset lifecycle, and integrating these multiple streams of information in a unified, role-based interface, companies can now make better decisions and tackle some of their most pressing and enduring challenges,” he explains. “And, by doing so, they save time, improve their operations, and achieve tangible financial results.”
And, for Perstorp, this successful collaboration with Octave could pave the way to new ones. The company’s project organization already considers adopting some of Octave’s market-leading engineering products, which natively integrate with
InConcert Core - providing the perfect toolset to power Perstorp’s path to Smart Digital Reality, and its future growth.
