Manufacturing Industry Case Study
/ / LyondellBasell Rolls Out Real-Time Web Dashboard to Monitor and Manage Emissions
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—Chemical and Oil gas
Customer Profile
LyondellBasell Industries is one of the world’s largest producers of polymers, petrochemicals, and fuels. It employs 15,000 people in 19 countries and has annual revenues of U.S.$44.7 billion.
Business Situation
LyondellBasell needed to quickly meet a new Texas carbon-emissions regulation. If the company missed the deadline, it could lose its operating permit.
Solution
LyondellBasell selected VisionMonitor Compliance Intelligence (VMCI), a Microsoft® software–based environmental monitoring program that provides a Web-based management dashboard and automated alerts.
Benefits
n Reduced time-to-market
n Reduced ownership costs
n Excellent uptime
n Empowered employees
n Easily adaptable to meet future regulations / “Microsoft software helps us put data into ourpeople’s hands to help them make smart decisionsfaster.”
Bruce Pollard, Business Solutions Lead, Lyondell Chemical Company, a LyondellBasell Company
LyondellBasell Industries needed to meet new air-quality regulations in Southeast Texas, where its subsidiaries operate eight manufacturing plants. The global petrochemicals and polymers manufacturer opted for a flexible, Microsoft® software–based solution called VisionMonitor Compliance Intelligence (VMCI) from VisionMonitor Software, a Microsoft Certified Partner. LyondellBasell implemented the solution in just eight months. With VMCI, LyondellBasell has an environmental monitoring and management solution that empowers employees to proactively assess 12,000 data points every five minutes using a Web-based dashboard. The system is reliable, cost-effective, and adaptable to meet new regulatory and business requirements as they arise.
Situation
On December 20, 2007, Lyondell Chemical Company and Basell completed their merger to create LyondellBasell Industries, one of the world’s largest producers of polymers, chemicals, and fuels. The company is the global leader in polyolefins technology, production, and marketing; a pioneer in propylene oxide and derivatives; and a significant producer of fuels and refined products, including biofuels. Headquartered in the Netherlands, LyondellBasell has combined annual revenues of U.S.$44.7 billion, 60 manufacturing sites in 19 countries on five continents, and more than 16,000 employees worldwide.
In 2002, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality announced new regulations to control emissions of highly reactive volatile organic compounds in the Houston-Galveston-Brazoria area of Southeast Texas. Eight LyondellBasell subsidiary sites were affected by the initiative, which requires that companies manage emissions for flares, cooling towers, process vents, and other emissions sources. The regulation also imposed stringent requirements for managing various events and process issues.
LyondellBasell added new equipment at each plant to monitor the emission sources and interfaced them to various real-time data collection systems. However, these systems could not efficiently aggregate data; perform complex calculations; enable record-keeping, reporting, or auditing; or display information over a Web-based portal—all capabilities that LyondellBasell needed to meet the Texas regulation.
Complying with the new regulation was critical to LyondellBasell. The company had two years to make the physical modifications to its plant equipment at eight facilities. But because the state spent much of that time gathering feedback from affected companies, LyondellBasell would not know the final data collection rules until six months before it had to start collecting data. If the company was deficient in meeting the regulation or its deadline, it could risk losing its operating permit or harm its relationship with local communities, which would have an adverse impact on its revenues and brand.
Solution
Bruce Pollard, Business Solutions Lead for Lyondell Chemical Company, a LyondellBasell Company, along with a multidisciplinary team including IT professionals and workers from the Houston, Texas, facilities, were tasked with meeting the new requirements on time and as cost-effectively as possible. “Three of our guiding principles for all technology projects are: buy versus build, fit in with our Microsoft®-based infrastructure, and run on SQL Server® [database software],” he explains. “The technology used for this particular system also had to scale to accommodate terabytes of data.”
LyondellBasell further wanted the application to run on a single copy of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 software so that the company could easily integrate data from all eight facilities into a single management dashboard. “We have seen proof of the maturity of Microsoft .NET, SQL Server, and the Windows Server® operating system,” Pollard says. “We know that they work well together, that there are rich reporting solutions for SQL Server, and that SQL Server scales very well.”
The LyondellBasell team evaluated several alternatives and ultimately selected VisionMonitor Compliance Intelligence (VMCI) software from Houston-based VisionMonitor Software, a Microsoft Certified Partner that provides energy companies with enterprise-wide software solutions for managing compliance with environmental regulations.
“We liked VMCI because it was one integrated program that worked with SQL Server, and it had a smaller software footprint than the other solutions,” Pollard says. “It was also flexible enough so we could modify it in a very short time to meet the final data collection requirements. Last, it was the only choice that was ‘all Microsoft,’ which meant that it presented a significantly lower risk than other products at the same cost.”
Working with VisionMonitor, LyondellBasell implemented its new environmental monitoring and reporting system in just eight months. “An eight-month implementation time from selection to go-live for a system of this kind is unheard of,” Pollard says. “They often take years.”
LyondellBasell runs the VMCI scheduler and database code on a single HP ProLiant DL580 G2 server containing four 2.2-gigahertz 32-bit Intel Xeon processors. The presentation layer code runs on the company’s consolidated Web application farm, which consists of three HP DL385 G1 servers containing two 2.2-gigahertz AMD Opteron processors. The company has an identical staging environment that doubles as a fail-over backup in case of an emergency—a big advantage for plants located in Texas’s hurricane alley. “It only takes a few minutes to fail over between our production and backup systems because of the fast SQL Server data logs,” Pollard says.
Dashboard-Based Environmental Monitoring
With its new VMCI application, LyondellBasell operations people are able to monitor, manage, and predict compliance with various regulatory standards and reporting requirements using a Web browser and a simple, yet powerful, dashboard interface. This includes monitoring hourly emissions and tracking annual caps at each facility, managing processes involved with analyzer failures andmissing data, and generating corrective action alerts. LyondellBasell can provide dynamic reporting for a variety of emissions and perform real-time calculations on emissions. The VMCI system collects up to 12,000 data points every five minutes from 23 data collection systems located across eight facilities, totaling more than 250 million records annually. And because the VMCI system is role-based, it makes the right information available to the right people at the right time.
“This system allows our operators to proactively monitor emission levels so we can avoid exceeding limits,” Pollard says. “Alerting is a key capability. We can incorporate business rules as well as regulatory rules to alert our people in a preemptive fashion. Thanks to this alerting function, they can do their regular jobs as well as monitor for the new regulation.”
Proven Microsoft Foundation
VMCI is the first commercial environmental management information system (EMIS) built completely on the Microsoft .NET Framework. It’s also the first EMIS to use a Web portal interface and offer data management capabilities. Today, VMCI runs on the Windows Server 2003 operating system with SQL Server 2005 as its database, and uses the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 messaging and collaboration server for alerting. In the near future, however, VisionMonitor plans to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Internet Information Services 6.0 functions as the Web server, and users access the application using the Windows® Internet Explorer® Internet browser.
“We have seen most of the major oil, gas, and chemical companies standardize on Microsoft products,” says Kurt Stoll, Director of Marketing and Communications for VisionMonitor. “Because our customers have already made such a great investment in Microsoft technologies, and both IT staff and end users are familiar with Microsoft programs, it was logical for us to go in the same direction when developing VMCI. Microsoft technologies are proven across theboard, which gives our system a vote ofconfidence.”
Costs are lower, too, with a Microsoft-based solution. “We wanted a solution that could be deployed easily across large and small enterprises,” Stoll says. “Microsoft products are cost-effective to develop, maintain, and support. There are many more resources in the market for Microsoft software than for proprietary solutions, which lowers development costs. Also, Microsoft software integrates easily with existing customer applications, scales across a global enterprise, and is easily extensible to meet our clients’ evolving needs.”
Benefits
Using the VisionMonitor compliance software based on Microsoft technology, LyondellBasell has been able to meet the new Texas environmental regulation on time and within budget. Ongoing maintenance costs are low, system reliability is high, and employees have the tools they need to make informed decisions that are critical to the company’s environmental compliance. LyondellBasell has already extended the system to meet new environmental reporting requirements.
Reduced Time-to-Market
Its early implementation of VMCI gave LyondellBasell a competitive edge; some competitors are still trying to meet the regulations—and risking expensive fines. “I’vebeen involved in many different Web implementations,” Pollard says. “This has been the first all-Microsoft one, and it clearly was faster by a factor of two or more. For example, we had to develop a security model for this application, and we simply used our existing Active Directory® security principles without having to develop a new model or reeducate everyone. Everyone already ‘spoke’ Microsoft security.”
Reduced Ownership Costs
The total cost of ownership was much lower for VMCI than for competitive solutions because of lower software, hardware, and maintenance costs. “Because we run a single instance of VMCI on a single SQL Server 2005 database and our standard Microsoft .NET Web farm for eight sites, we realized significant software licensing and server computer savings,” Pollard says. Only one backup system, rather than eight, is required for the entire company. Desktop computer hardware, too, is less expensive because VMCI is browser-based, which eliminates the need for a specialized, processing-intensive client application and associated hardware, plus all the support that goes with them.
Development costs were low, as well, because of the company’s familiarity with Microsoft SQL Server and ability to customize SQL Server code without interfering with VMCI’s code. “We are also realizing significant ongoing maintenance savings in terms of how we monitor the servers and perform backups,” Pollard says. “We need only one expert, versus a whole fleet of people.”
The simplicity of the dashboard-based system has meant that LyondellBasell hasn’t had to hire more people to meet the new regulations. “Because the system is alert-based and very easy to use, our operators can do their normal jobs while adding this extra responsibility. They do take extra time every week tocreate reports, but this is done very efficiently.”
Excellent Uptime
The Microsoft software underlying the VisionMonitor solution has demonstrated outstanding reliability, which is critical for an application requiring 98 percent uptime. “We can run for months and months without rebooting SQL Server,” Pollard says. “In fact, we’ve had no unplanned downtime for this application in the two years we’ve been running it.”
Empowered Employees
Pollard emphasizes that the company’s people make the business run well by making smart decisions—but the right software helps LyondellBasell’s people do their jobs even better. “Microsoft software helps us put data into our people’s hands to help them make smart decisions faster,” Pollard says. “It makes it easier for our people to use their expertise, and in the environmental area, that’s young expertise. The average age of an environmental engineer is significantly lower than that of our operating engineers. Web-based tools like VMCI are familiar to these people.”
Easily Adaptable to Meet Future Regulations
VMCI is flexible and extensible, which means LyondellBasell can use it to manage other emissions and comply with future regulations. In fact, the company has already begun using VMCI to manage nitrogen oxide and greenhouse-gas emissions. “The requirement to aggregate and report data applies to many other permitted business areas,” Pollard says. “We’re ready to expand the use of VMCI beyond our eight Texas plants to other plants and other regulations as they are adopted.”
LyondellBasell foresees VMCI being a big help in managing upcoming “cap and trade” programs that may require companies to pay for releasing carbon into the atmosphere. To pay fair prices, LyondellBasell will have to carefully measure its carbon-related emissions. “This system will help us do that,” Pollard says. “Other companies are scrambling to meet these requirements, but we’re all set. We got there early, quickly, and easily, which gives us a head start in meeting all future requirements.”
Microsoft Solutions for the Manufacturing Industry
Manufacturing enterprises must compete in an increasingly global environment. Success depends on finding ever-greater efficiencies throughout the enterprise, while developing a greater agility to react to local and global market opportunities. These challenges are best answered with technology from Microsoft and its partners. Microsoft-based solutions offer much needed value to manufacturers who are under increasing pressure to generate greater returns on the assets that they have employed. This focus on efficiency scales across all the critical functional areas—from getting products to market faster, to streamlining the supply chain, optimizing the manufacturing operations, and generating new revenue streams.
For more information about Microsoft solutions for the manufacturing industry, goto:
www.microsoft.com/resources/manufacturing