Yokogawa North America Event Highlights Operational Excellence

Summary

Last month, Yokogawa held its North American Users Conference at the (very familiar) Renaissance SeaWorld hotel in Orlando, Florida.  This regional conference drew more than 350 participants. In his opening address, Shuji Mori, CEO and President of Yokogawa Corporation America, urged the audience to look to the future of industrial automation and business process transformation for operational excellence by taking advantage of the company’s Synaptic Business Automation (SBA) concept and co-innovation programs.

The exhibition area showcased the five categories of Yokogawa’s recently announced “OpreX” brand: OpreX Measurement, OpreX Control, OpreX Execution, OpreX Transformation, and OpreX Lifecycle. Together, they encompass Yokogawa’s entire industrial automation (IA) portfolio from measurement devices all the way up to transformative management solutions to support operational excellence.

To help its customers transform their businesses, Yokogawa is expanding its own solutions and service business and engaging with customers through a co-innovation process designed to help companies optimize their operations. By merging KBC’s business performance improvement business with Yokogawa’s measurement, control, and information technologies and the cloud platform acquired through the acquisition of Industrial Evolution, the company aims to create new industrial differentiation and become the global leader in the advanced solutions field. 

Key operational excellence takeaways from the 2018 conference include:

• Yokogawa’s investment and co-innovation strategy brings together mission-critical control and safety with fog and cloud computing and analytics, effectively converging IT and OT.
• “OpreX Transformation,” Yokogawa’s branded digital transformation program, supports operability (asset safety, reliability, and availability) and operational excellence (the best the asset can be). OpreX = Operability + Excellence

• KBC’s business consulting expertise, analysis, and recommendations helps customers on their digital transformation journey, whether they are already well along or just beginning that journey

Portfolio for OT/IT Convergence

Shigeyoshi Uehara, Vice President, IA Products & Service, presented the business vision and direction.  These imply profound changes in business processes across supply chain, workforce utilization, or process optimization.  According to Mr. Uehara, the OT/IT convergence portfolio encompasses customer readiness for digital transformation and provides integrated automation solutions delivered by a trusted partner with a forward-looking vision and a customer process to co-innovate. This creates agility and “synaptically” connects people, systems, data and supply chains through IT solutions and services.

This customer process begins by defining and identifying key improvement areas, a design and implementation process, support for an operatizing model, and – finally - a value creation process to sustain and improve upon key imperatives.

Typical end user challenges identified in digital transformation programs could include supply chain visibility; optimization; and more profitable operations when faced with complex constraints such as an ever-changing business environment, cyclical economy, and the changing workforce. Yokogawa’s expanded offering with KBC includes both consulting and solution services intended to create sustainable value for customers and deliver optimal services though business and domain knowledge and edge computing solutions.

Yokogawa is expanding its value proposition through new acquisitions. KBC, for example, brings specialized process industry knowledge, Industrial Evolution brings secure private cloud services and customer data sharing, and SoteicaVisual Mesa brings energy management and optimization software.

Such a diverse, mission-critical, IT/OT footprint requires some new thinking about cybersecurity capability and competency. According to Mr. Uehara, Yokogawa has made a large investment to build a strong cybersecurity program leveraging ISASecure, EDSA certification, and focusing on secure-by-design approaches. Yokogawa engineers receive professional training and certification through global industrial security professional (GICSP) certification, which effectively bridges IT and OT. Today, the company has more than 570 security professionals working actively in the cybersecurity programs, including remote performance monitoring and managed services from a Security Operations Center (SOC) and security consulting services.

OpreX Transformation

With the acquisition of KBC in 2016, Yokogawa made a significant leap forward in the oil & gas and petrochemical industries. KBC Technologies has deep subject matter expertise and a long history of business value consulting extending from the molecular level up to plant management. Later the same year, Yokogawa fully acquired Soteica Visual Mesa (SVM) and merged it into the KBC business, thereby adding a capability in energy and supply chain management and scheduling. Adding in Industrial Evolution’s cloud-based business model and OT service capabilities, KBC’s capabilities - combined with Yokogawa’s reliable control and safety solutions – now provide the company an opportunity to think differently about digital transformation.

OpreX Transformation brings together comprehensive core solutions that take a broad view in driving operational excellence. These solutions build upon Yokogawa’s proven operability track record providing exceptionally reliable measurement and control technology.  They span many activities across an enterprise, from production to the supply chain and business management. The company co-innovates with client teams to bring about successful business transformation through operational excellence.

KBC and Digitalization

KBC, a company well known for its reactor modeling capabilities, now looks to “digital” to transform the industry outcomes. Andy Howell, CEO of KBC (which operates as an autonomous business unit within Yokogawa), described their approach to achieving operational excellence through digitalization. Autonomy gives KBC the freedom to work with all technology suppliers in this pursuit.  Digitalization involves both the scalable application of digital technologies and alignment of the company’s organizational capabilities.  According to Mr. Howell, it can provide:

• Deeper insights to streamline decision making
• Greater certainty and therefore lower business risk
• Seamless execution of decisions through automation
• Empowered people with greater job satisfaction

• Wider scope of accountability

While KBC can work with other technology suppliers, Yokogawa effectively “digitalizes” KBC’s expertise, combining that unit’s domain expertise and technology with the necessary sensors, optimization software, and control and safety infrastructure to make the KBC recommendations a reality.

KBC Co-Pilot Program

The KBC Co-Pilot program is a private cloud-based service using historian data, process models, and LP models in the form of a real-time digital twin of the plant, combined with KBC remote experts. Co-Pilot serves as an extra subject matter expert and set of eyes for many industrial processes.  Users can benefit from using KBC Petro-SIM via an intuitive dashboard. For example, in an oil refinery, Petro-SIM model simulations in the cloud can provide real-time unit reconciliation and optimization or validation of the LP planning model. KBC engineers steward performance analysis insight and recommendations and reporting. Co-Pilot can compare actual to predicted results and adjust the LP model for a complete refinery.

Petro-SIM model updates and calibration are performed in the cloud, each mirroring the actual plant and synchronizing with the on-premise model (if there is one).  Co-Pilot can establish KPIs in near real-time and monitor variables, many of which are not directly measurable. Other data such as equipment data can also be monitored through the KPI dashboard. KPIs provide relevant actionable information, with progressively more information and detail the deeper you go into the dashboard. Usually, customer involvement is critical to convince the process licensor to share data from specific licensed technology with KBC’s Co-Pilot Program. To date, most process licensors have cooperated since they value their relationships with their end users.

Conclusion

Yokogawa announced its acquisition of KBC Advanced Technologies in 2016.  Clearly, we’re starting to see how this helps differentiate Yokogawa from other major automation suppliers.  KBC subject matter expertise in the energy and chemicals verticals, combined with Yokogawa’s digitalization infrastructure and connectivity, are helping the company transform its customers businesses.  This is consistent with the company’s Synaptic Business Automation concept.

KBC provides a unique combination of analytics technologies and management and engineering consulting focused on operational excellence and profit improvement for upstream and downstream oil and gas and refinery-integrated petrochemicals.  KBC’s software portfolio of process unit reactor models, high-fidelity thermodynamics and plant-wide simulation software complements Yokogawa’s existing suite of solutions.  Inside Yokogawa, KBC is already extending its successful operational excellence business model into adjacent industries, especially where there is strong market growth or where Yokogawa is particularly strong.  A significant proportion of KBC’s order book consists of chemicals, utilities, and renewable energy companies.

Furthermore, KBC's consultants have deep domain expertise and extensive C-level customer relationships, which is expected to increase Yokogawa’s mindshare among these key decision makers and help it further its goals of being a trusted partner for customers.

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Keywords: Operational Excellence, Digital Transformation, OpreX, Yokogawa, KBC, ARC Advisory Group.