Pharmaceutical manufacturing is one of the most complex and highly regulated industries in the world. Succeeding at the cutting edge of drug development and production requires the ability to quickly and flexibly respond to increasingly complex challenges. The key to that flexibility is data: harnessing a fire hose of real-time information to analyze, adapt, predict, and improve processes. Headquartered in Kenilworth, NJ, USA Merck & Co. (also known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) first implemented the PI System at its small molecule manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania in 1993. Since then, Merck has expanded the use of the real-time data infrastructure to more than 18 sites around the world and has become a long-time OSIsoft Enterprise Agreement customer. At a pair of presentations delivered during PI World San Francisco 2019, Merck experts spoke about the transformative impact that holistic data management with the PI System is making on the company to enable a shift from batch to continuous manufacturing and support improved monitoring and real-time analysis.
Year: 2019

Founded in 2018 from the merger of two major Canadian agriculture supply businesses, Saskatoon-based Nutrien is the world’s largest producer of potash and the second-largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer. When PotashCorp and Agrium merged to form Nutrien, one side of the merger was already on the road to an enterprise-wide approach to data management with the PI System™, while the other had operational data in an entirely different system. By taking a methodical, enterprise-wide approach to data, Nutrien was able to bring all of its historical data into the PI System and is now using data to look ahead to new business opportunities.
Year: 2019

Founded in 1931 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) is the largest state public power operation in the United States. With over 1,400 miles of transmission assets scattered across the state, NYPA’s mission is to power the economic growth and competitiveness of New York State by providing customers with low cost, clean, reliable power. But doing so is no small feat. It requires optimizing power generation assets, ranging from hydro to combined cycle, fossil fuel, and natural gas, as well as moving power supply from the resource-rich northern terrain to the densely populated New York City. With 83 percent renewable energy, $200 million in energy services business and an AA credit rating, it’s clear that NYPA is delivering on its promises. Yet the utility understands that achieving operational excellence is a dynamic process. Never content to settle, NYPA embarked on an ambitious strategic plan focusing on customer empowerment, infrastructure modernization, and resource alignment. After signing an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with OSIsoft in 2017, NYPA adopted the PI System as an enterprise-wide data infrastructure at the center of its transformation into an end-to-end digital utility.
Year: 2019

Covestro’s story is a common one in the manufacturing world. The company had a wealth of data streaming in from equipment and processes: data that could theoretically be harnessed and acted upon. But its data was difficult to access, stored in local silos, and cut off from sharing and analysis by the lack of enterprise-wide data standards. The fix for Covestro: Making full use of its PI System. Instead of a series of data islands built around local PI System servers, Covestro now has a single data hub that allows for easy collaboration, advanced analysis, and access to real-time, context-rich data across the company. With help from OSIsoft, a multidisciplinary team of engineers at Covestro built a flexible, accessible data hub from the ground up, first standardizing how data is captured and stored, then organizing it within a virtual model of the company’s physical assets, and finally using the newly accessible data to build powerful visualization and simulation tools. The system gives Covestro engineers easy access to a variety of advanced analytics, from diagnosing problems with common manufacturing processes to using machine learning tools to detect anomalies, to performing advanced forecasts and scenario testing.
Year: 2019

Liberty Ostrava (formerly ArcelorMittal Ostrava) is a steel manufacturing company located in the Czech Republic. Liberty Ostrava is a complete industrial plant, creating and running everything required in the steel manufacturing process, from the power needed to run the plant to milling and refining. Its extensive facilities include a coke plant, blast furnaces, steel casting plant, various kinds of steel mills, power plants, laboratories, and foundries. Despite the complexity of its data needs, its disparate systems were disconnected. “Unfortunately in the past, each plant developed their own system. So you can find several applications, in several different environments, run on several different kinds of hardware. It was a mishmash,” said Radim Lužný, Head of MES at Liberty Ostrava, during PI World Gothenburg 2019. “My task since 2015 was to unify the system as much as possible.” ...
Year: 2019