All Thursday seminars are given by Gold or Silver Innovation Leaders
Most abstracts and speaker information is provided in the Track information section below this schedule

TRACK 4 – DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Click on seminar title below to read the abstract

Tommy Mitchell, General Director, Rockwell Automation
Chemical and specialty chemicals companies globally are continuing to face budget constraints and pressures to keep operational expenses under control. In concurrence, the industry is also experiencing a greater degree of regulatory compliances, both related to product and environment. While most leaders recognize the benefits of digital transformation to address these challenges, many are trying to establish a business justification to embark on such a journey.

In the era of omnipresent digital technologies, the Chemical industries need to formulate a strategy for achieving data-enabled connected operations and empowering their organizations to make decisions – faster, more accurate and with less risk. The true convergence of IT/OT systems along with right digital solutions will help realize the benefits such as:

• Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the process
• Tight integration of production and business processes for better and faster decisions
• Access to real time product and performance data for feedback
• Predictive maintenance to reduce unexpected equipment shutdowns
• Emerging technologies such as (AR, AI, ML, 3D Printing) to empower employees
• Reduced energy costs and carbon footprint to improve sustainability standards

What attendees will learn:

  1. Current State of Digital Transformation in the Chemical Industry
  2. Introduction to Digital Transformation Approach: Concept to Reality
  3. Value Streams and Benefits:
    a. Compliance based EBR functionality with IT/OT convergence
    b. Data transparency throughout product lifecycle management
    c. Predictive monitoring & control for product and process safety
    d. Improved productivity with the adoption of emerging technologies
Erik Danford-Klein, Sales Engineer
Now more than ever before, asset-intensive organizations are recognizing the competitive advantages of interconnectivity and integration. It simply isn’t sustainable to work around silos between maintenance, operations, health and safety, and asset data. Join Prometheus Group on an exploration of how true integration between your maintenance, operations, health and safety, contractors, shutdown/outage and asset data teams can produce exceptional ROI by increasing productivity, decreasing unplanned downtime, optimizing inventory management, and capturing and sharing information in real-time.
What attendees will learn|
Prometheus Group will demonstrate our solution suite as well as a collection of tips and best practices for planners and schedulers, maintenance and operations supervisors, and management. From  budgeting to mobility, master data to shutdowns/turnarounds and capital projects, your future is integrated. We’ll help you get there

Rick Jones, RVP Digital Supply Chain, SAP America

Chemical Companies seek to align technology across their value chain at scale to innovate, drive new sources of value, and win in the market with digital transformation enabling faster adoption to a changing reality. The ability to transform requires connecting strategy to execution and leveraging data across the ecosystem while extending capabilities through intelligent technologies to solve the mostcomplex challenges. Finally, digital transformation enables chemical companies to create resilient and agile operations while synchronizing outcomes for superior customer value, break down silos for holistic planning, and empower people for enhanced contribution their organization.

What attendees will learn:

  • How digital transformation synchronizes outcomes across the value chain
  • How digital technology is the enabler of new opportunities for growth in the Industry
  • The value of connecting, integrating, and extending data for fast and quality decision making
  • How digital transformation breaks down silos for dynamic and actionable insight
  • How organizations are creating resiliency and agility in their operations and ecosystems
Darlene French, Director, Global Chemical Practice, Industry Value Chain, SAP Ariba
Business Leaders in the Chemical Industry are under significant pressure to mitigate risk in supply chain disruption after a series of disruptions from COVID to natural disasters that have shut plants down. Supply Chain agility has become essential. Leaders are turning to Collaboration internally and externally to orchestrate a multi tiered Supply Chain to reduce disruptions while managing risk and sustainability. This session will share adopted best practices of Chemical companies that allow them to be nimble when faced with disruptions in supply and/or logistics while creating efficiencies that reduce costs.

What attendees will learn:

  • Learn the best practices of orchestrating a complex multi-tiered Supply Chain to minimize disruption.
  • How to manage Risk and Sustainability throughout the Supply Chain Process
  • How to Improve agility to handle a disruption when it occurs.
  • Ways to improve Supply Chain process efficiencies to reduce costs
John Vargo, Director – MES, RoviSys
Digital Transformation is all around us. New technologies are opening opportunity to identify and improve manufacturing efficiency and performance while also creating new business models to increase top-line growth. However, studies indicate that the majority of digitalization initiatives are not reaching their stated goals and are failing to deliver the value they were chartered to achieve. Manufacturers are faced with critical decisions as they evaluate the cluttered technology landscape and new tools that promise to deliver transformative change.

RoviSys has been implementing projects to connect and expose plant floor data for 30 years. Our expertise stems from plant floor control and automation experience across many industries. This real world, plant operations background empowers our teams to define and deliver solutions that enable the digitalization results manufacturing executives are seeking. This discussion will share key learnings about setting a digitalization strategy founded in business value, leveraging existing data, avoiding pilot purgatory, and setting a forward-focused vision toward growth opportunities your business may not even know exist.

What attendees will learn:

  • Why starting digitalization initiatives is important for businesses despite the inherent complexities and challenges associated with them.
  • Critical factors that need to be defined before starting an initiative to improve likelihood of success.
  • Examples of objectives and tactics that organizations of varying maturity levels are implementing.
  • The importance of understanding the impacts of these initiatives will have on operations and manufacturing teams.
  • A framework for establishing a program roadmap that focuses on creating long-term value.
Lou Bachenheimer, Director of Solution Architecture, Blue Prism
A decade of austerity, compounded by the global pandemic, has had a profound effect on every aspect of the chemical industry. Across departments and functions budgets are squeezed to breaking point and resources cannot meet rising demand. The problem is that cutting back on staff and services is not a viable solution. Something must change. Organizations simply cannot squeeze any more efficiency from the current process model. People cannot work any faster, or any longer. As a result many organizations are turning to intelligent automation. This session focuses on critical services and how intelligent automation can help to save operating costs, improve service levels and take pressure from already beleaguered staff.

What attendees will learn:

  • How intelligent automation enables a personalized experience
  • The value of intelligent automation to eChem
  • How industries are reimagining their experience with intelligent automation
Lou Bachenheimer, Director of Solution Architecture, Blue Prism
The biggest barrier to supply chain diversification for most companies is resources and cost. They simply don’t have the time to undertake what is rightly seen as a rigorous, painstaking process, particularly during the pandemic, when there are so many other more immediate, more visible priorities. However, we’re now working with a number of companies to explore how intelligent automation can help them to address this resourcing problem, with digital workers being deployed to undertake the ‘heavy lifting’ work that goes with finding, engaging, selecting and onboarding new suppliers, whether domestic, regional or global. By introducing an intelligent digital workforce, which can be scaled up or down in real-time according to business need, Companies can automate

What attendees will learn:

  • How Companies processes developed from requirements gathering, to go live, to in production
  • Lessons learned, what works and what doesn’t – along the connected-RPA journey
William Blankemeier, President, PeopleFlo
We face an age-old problem: control loop machines – electric motor, pump and control valve – interact in counterproductive ways, wasting enormous amounts of electrical energy and causing serious problems with machine reliability. From the perspective of energy waste, this interaction is analogous to driving a car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. From a reliability standpoint, when a control valve travel changes, the pump’s operating point changes, often resulting in operation at unstable regions ofn the pump curve. Learn how MachineEdge uses AI-driven optimization and automation, at the edge and in real time, to save 50% on energy consumption and improve MTBF.

What attendees will learn:

  • MachineEdge works without any changes to the existing infrastructure or the process control system.
  • Saving 50% on pump energy consumption is feasible.
  • MachineEdge moves a pump’s operating point to a more reliable region on the pump curve.
  • MachineEdge aftermarket retrofits are plug-and-play and can payback in <1 year.

Subject and speaker to be announced

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