Presentation: An Enterprise Collaborative Environment to Enable the Daily Operations Decision-making Process

Polimeri Europa is a petrochemical company wholly owned and controlled by ENI spa managing the production and marketing of a wide portfolio of petrochemical products. The company need was to simplify the decision-making process providing in the early morning timely production data to Operations managers. Information comes from several production sites across Europe and covers different business divisions. Such data is available in disparate systems including site PI Systems and specific relational databases. Manual data entry features were also needed to enter missing information and to validate existing data. Polimeri Europa identified in a web-based collaborative environment the right approach in order to provide a common platform to consolidate, share and report timely production information. Major issues to be addressed have been to homogenize data collection from all sites independently of the data sources and to provide a common collaborative environment in order to share information view and report to all users at different level of authorization across the enterprise. Polimeri Europa decided to leverage previous investments made in OSIsoft real-time infrastructure in order to cover the analysis, communication, and presentation gaps. PI-Analysis Framework has been used to model production site information and data collection and aggregation rules. SOA-based connectivity components have been introduced to empower AF in order to reference efficiently huge amount of non-PI data and to guarantee AF data exposure to the web. At sites shift personnel access a common web portal configured using Microsoft Sharepoint and OSIsoft RtWebParts to access, validate already aggregated data, and manually enter missing information. Data-entry web parts have been provided to extend the standard portal environment. Shared RtWebParts reports and views support decision making personnel. The result is a scalable and configurable environment that Polimeri Europa is using to provide the business service to all production sites. Up to now, the solution has been implemented for more than 10 sites across Europe and it has been well accepted by site shift personnel and headquarters managers. Significance: Polimeri Europa used a web-based collaborative environment as a common platform to consolidate, share and report timely production information.