The connected plant: Improvements and efficiencies through digitization - Rebecca Liebert

Thank you.

So, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it's exciting to be here to talk about transformation. If I look back at UOP, 103 years, we've transformed ourselves numerous times, and we've done this because we've had to stay ahead of the demands of our customers. Although we've transformed, one thing that we've done consistently with our customers is be there through project design, build, construction, startup, and even ongoing service. And what every customer wants is maximizing the return on that investment. And to do that, they push their units to the limit — you know it, you guys all do it, right? You're pushing the units to the limit. And when you're at the limit, small things can create big challenges: unplanned downtime, underperforming assets, human capital challenges — and this is getting bigger and bigger. It's not just do you have enough employees, but do you have the right talented and trained employees. And lastly, energy emissions — as you're pushing the limit, you're pushing the limit of your permits, you're pushing the limit of what you can emit, and that's even more and more critical as we look to the future.

So from a UOP perspective, we typically would handle these operational challenges by sending in our service organization, and we'd analyze the data, look at the process and the system, and we'd spend the time finding the right answer. But this takes time. And you know, the future clearly doesn't have to be reflective of the past, because with all of the connectivity that's available, we can now use big data, sensors, the sensor capability available because of the compute power that's out there, and the compatibility with the cloud has truly enabled a transformation in our industry. And this is truly the future. I think any industrial company that doesn't start to use a connected plant is going to be behind. And we talked about yesterday the need for operational excellence — the connected plant can truly drive that operational excellence.

So what does it really mean to be connected? We think about connectivity as connecting the process, the assets, and the people to continually redefine optimal performance. Because if you don't connect all three, you're going to have limits and gaps in what you're doing. And if you do this right, there's millions of dollars to be had. A typical refinery, as an example, could be up to 25 million dollars a year if you can get that extra operational efficiency out of your plant.

Now, how does this all work? It sounds a little bit complex, but it's pretty simple when you boil it down. We take a picture of your plant, basically, and we put it in the cloud — it's called a digital twin. We make a model of your plant, put it in the cloud, we connect it to all of the UOP kinetic models, and we also connect it to OEM ecosystems like assets — compressors, pumps, turbo expanders — think about all those assets that have to work really, really well for your process to be at peak performance. And then we connect it to your people, so you can have a service employee from Honeywell, as an example, watching your screen and your monitor along with your employees, all working together in the cloud to optimize your plant.

Now, people are really concerned about cybersecurity, but the good news about this is the data streams one way — it streams from your plant to the cloud, and that's where all the work is done. And then the information is given in a way that changes can be made without streaming data back down. So you don't have to worry about cybersecurity and cyber threats. So that's basically how it works. So let's transition now and talk about the three pillars: the connected process, the connected plant and the assets, and the connected people.

So connected process — it's composed of five different modules. The most important modules so far have been the reliability advisor and the optimization advisor. Think about reliability — it preempts problems so you can run closer to that edge, you can really push the limits if you're dealing with those problems early on. Optimization — how do you maximize to get the maximum value out of your plant? Really marrying with the economics on a real-time what-if basis: what if I turn this, what if I turn that, what kind of additional performance can I get? And then there's utility management — we lose a lot of energy in our plants, heat recovery, hydrogen, other things like that. So being able to get the maximum out of your plants is a big part of what we're doing. And then benchmarking — because we're collecting data from all around the world, we can understand where your plant would compete with the rest of the world. We do that obviously very privately so that we don't share data, but we can show you where you compete against others. And then predictive maintenance, so you can proactively get at those problems before they become a real problem.

So take an example of what we would have done before. There's three swim lanes if you look at this chart. The top swim lane shows how we would have resolved a problem historically: the problem happens, it's detected, then there's some analytics at the customer location, they determine if they need Honeywell UOP to come help. If so, data is sent to us, our service team and technical community analyze it, they then formulate a solution, formulate a response, and get that back to the customer. That can take a significant amount of time.

We launched several years ago a first generation of software monitoring that we called UOP — this wasn't real-time continuous monitoring, but it took data, sent it to UOP where teams could look at this data. But it was an after-the-fact, it was still a reactive model. It shortened the time frame but still really didn't get at the proactive resolution of the problem.

Our new Honeywell Connected Plant does this very proactively. We are looking at data in real-time, we're seeing those problems, and then we're getting those to the customer and getting them resolved before there's a day of downtime.

So if you connect the assets — the process is good, but the process is only as good as the assets that are connected. And so we've partnered with many of the major asset suppliers in the industry to ensure that they're connected into our process ecosystem. The beauty of doing it this way is there's one data pipe out of your plant and into the cloud, and everything is connected together so we can drive optimal performance of the assets and the process simultaneously. You can see examples anywhere from turbo expanders to pumps to pipelines to valves and gauges — any kind of asset we can connect into the ecosystem. And it really is this connectivity that's critical.

And then lastly, as I talked about, people — it's really important that we bring the people into the solution. When we think about people, there's three major areas. One is the training of the people — they have to be constantly brought up to the latest technology that's available. This is competency management: how are you certain that your employees are trained at the right level? Secondly, are they in positions where it could be very dangerous? We have the ability to put sensors — whether it's a gas detector, a motion detector, or a height detector — so that you can tell: are they at an elevation that they shouldn't be? Could they fall? Are they making a lot of bobbling and moves that could be indicative that they're in an unsafe place? These are the kinds of things you can do to monitor your people today. And lastly, putting that artificial intelligence at their fingertips — consider a pair of safety goggles that have inside the safety goggle all the startup procedures for a particular unit, or all of the data and metrics on how to run a particular piece of equipment. That's available today, and then your people can real-time make decisions on what they're doing at the unit versus having to be constantly going back to the control room, referencing manuals, etc.

So adoption of the Honeywell Connected Plant has been quite strong. You can see some of the data there on the screen — I won't go through all the detail, but we're also not just doing this externally. This is very real within Honeywell and within UOP, and we're using these digital capabilities to truly transform the internals of Honeywell.

And some customer examples from all around the world — you can see various units: FCC, CCR, Oleflex. So we can put the Honeywell Connected Plant in many different types of technologies around the world, and we continue to have adoptions. I think when we had this particular slide built, there was 19 units that had been signed up, but since that time the numbers have escalated quite dramatically.

And to put it in perspective on the value that can be generated — if you just take the GCC region alone, with currently available UOP technology, there's about a quarter of a billion dollars of value to be unlocked. If you add to that refining operations, which I know many of you also operate, there's a billion dollars of value to be unlocked in the GCC region alone.

So with that, I'd like to close and thank everyone for listening to the digital transformation story and the Honeywell Connected Plant, and I'll take questions.