Breadth of connectivity
Air Liquide Large Industries found that Pervasive offers a wide breadth of data and application adapters, at a more attractive cost than others.
Efficiency gains
The company can automatically load its custom, internally developed optimization engine to aggregate and analyze production demand and forecasting data for the engineers. This has helped the company become more efficient.
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Interview
An intricate infrastructure dependent on diverse data sources
Air Liquide engages in industrial gas and hydrogen supply delivery. Through an intricate infrastructure of pipelines and other transportation methods, the company delivers market-sensitive products for its customers. Air Liquide Large Industries places important focus on the interdependency of hardware, networks and applications in analyzing production demand and forecasting. The company must be able to integrate diverse data sources in order to provide an optimal set of real-time data to capacity analysts and engineers. In continuous production networks, customers require precise, timely and dependable daily production quantities to make successful operational decisions. When Air Liquide Large Industries needed a cost-effective, end-to-end data integration solution to drive operations, it chose Pervasive Software.
Pervasive, a long-running partner, provides the right solutions as Air Liquide Large Industries grows its infrastructure and business. To best meet customer demand, Air Liquide Large Industries uses an Oracle-based data warehouse to compile data on real-time pipeline flows, pressure, customer orders, truck capacity and delivery, and maintenance schedules. Pervasive Data Integrator™ processes data and renders it into XML format and then feeds it to highly specialized, internally developed optimization engines. It also processes XML output files from the optimizer and loads the data into Oracle.
Disparate systems, applications
The Air Liquide Large Industries pipeline operations group examines a constant flow of data from numerous touch points to forecast production capabilities and ensure customer demand is met. According to Applications Manager Ron Reid, the company was using three disparate systems and five unique applications to provide data. This disparate IT environment hindered engineers’ ability to rapidly and effectively optimize production capacity, planning and analysis. Pipeline monitors examine the demand from customers on the pipelines. Complex, voluminous data sources from across the company provide additional data including truck capacity, maintenance schedules, etc. from Access, Excel, Lotus Notes and Oracle. The complex processes for data aggregation and analysis contributed to higher costs in equipment downtime and maintenance as well as volatility of supply. Any unplanned interruption in flows could impede service to Air Liquide Large Industries customers and negatively affect the bottom line.
A need for better connectivity for better decision-making
Adding to the complexity of the process was the presence of deregulated power markets in some regions, which affected pricing as often as every 15 minutes. An optimized information system would support the group with a better level of connectivity and monitoring across the supply chain, enabling it to more consistently meet targets for production and competitiveness. The challenge was to harness the volume of data and use it to target the usage rate of growth, forecast the market and meet the fluctuating needs of customers using real-time data and analysis. Doing so, the company believed it would decrease unplanned downtime, create more accurate forecasts and increase efficiency. Reid sought a system with the flexibility to support all Air Liquide America’s existing systems along with the ability to handle future business requirements.
Pervasive provides a wide breadth of connectors and a
real-time solution
After evaluating several product options, assessing the impact on quality and contrasting the services and costs, Air Liquide Large Industries selected Pervasive Data Integrator™ to take on their integration challenge. “We just felt Pervasive was the right company to get this done. They offer a wide breadth of data and application adapters, and provide the real-time solutions we want. Pervasive’s ability to read the schema and help in defining mapping to target was invaluable. They are far ahead of the competition in the XML and ETL markets and the tools are affordable as well,” explained Applications Manager Ron Reid. Pervasive’s professional services team assisted in implementing the Pipeline Optimization solution. Now, rather than having to mine numerous data sources, Air Liquide America can automatically load its custom, internally developed optimization engine to aggregate and analyze production demand and forecasting data for the engineers.
An enterprise Oracle system carries customer delivery and order information with real-time consumption data flows and pressure as well as Scada system data collection from the pipeline. Air Liquide Large Industries runs numerous data validation processes to ensure that real-time data is clean. Pervasive JMS connectors monitor notifications and are used to message the run-time environment to flag any errors. This integrated technology undertakes pre-emptive actions to help avoid issues when data is loaded into the data warehouse or into the optimizer.
The optimizer identifies all the points that are potentially impacted and initiates a workflow management process that notifies appropriate individuals of the effects of certain adjustments, including external dependencies. Maps retrieve data from the database and format it into a readable XML language required by the optimizer program. Pervasive tools work to build and translate 13,000-15,000 input files for each run into XML to be read by the optimization engine. The optimizer calculations generate forecasts of future customer consumption and the quantity that each plant should produce to meet the demand. Analysts and engineers then pre-fill or post-fill data and weigh the forecast against their maintenance schedule and input assumptions.
Project Diagram
Data trends and usage patterns emerge with dependable integration
Operational intelligence is a key competitive differentiator that enables top organizations to prepare for the future. Air Liquide Large Industries’ integrated system uses Pervasive Data Integrator™ to consolidate historic and real-time data providing a view of data trends and usage patterns. By leveraging their assets more effectively, the newly structured IT environment supports meaningful, timely decisions and enables prompt actions. Strategic planning and calculated risks can be carried out with minimized uncertainty. Optimizing work schedules and resource allocation enhances the value of operational and risk data intelligence and the returns it produces. This allows Air Liquide Large Industries to achieve greater reliability and efficiency from their assets and operations and provide a better quality of service to their customers.
Pervasive Data Integrator: An 'invaluable aid' moving ahead
Applications Manager Ron Reid believes the recent pipeline optimization improvements will lead to better forecasting. “Pervasive has allowed Air Liquide Large Industries to implement a user-friendly system that stores information from the scale of activities involved. The company can use this data to scrutinize forecast accuracy, identify variations in data and potential issues and ensure production levels. This is an invaluable aid to operations as we move ahead.”
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