(103a) Manufacturing Analytics – Conquering “Big Data” in Chemical Manufacturing

The Dow Chemical Company has been on a developmental path for three years now to fundamentally change how we handle and analyze large sets of real-time data to improve plant reliability and lower manufacturing costs. Introducing a concept at ARC - Orlando, 2013, we presented a talk on the design of an Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence within the Dow Chemical Company[i]. This talk focused the burning platform behind the initiative, visioning process that led to the initial steps of the implementation of an Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) platform within Dow, and described some initial challenges, and some preliminary results of this vision.

Since this time, Dow has continued the journey in the implementation of an EMI platform and is achieving success at implementing an enterprise platform that is bringing recognized value to our businesses and their manufacturing assets.

In this paper, we will review the fundamental approaches that needed to change to bring about the transformation we have achieved in mastering our plant data, provide use cases for the implementation of our enterprise design, as well as provide examples of potential future analytics cases as we attempt to continue the push for smarter, greater value analytics approaches to our plant data.  We will also provide some insight on what the future may hold as we drive towards a broad process to convert data to information to knowledge to wisdom.