Oct 29, 2019   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Aker BioMarine Digitalizes its Operations in Houston Plant to Improve Sustainability Efforts, Maintenance and More

With industrial digitalization on the rise, many companies are embracing big data as a solution for improving company processes, and Aker BioMarine is pioneering plant data management like never before. By collaborating with Cognite, a global expert in industrial data, Aker BioMarine is leveraging instant access to data analytics to improve a broad range of processes in its Houston based facility.

From the plant engineers to operations managers, Cognite’s Data Fusion platform is allowing the Houston team to make better decisions and is helping them improve their workdays regularly. A recent case study from the Houston plant shows positive results in the team’s access to data, process optimization, and maintenance improvement.

By giving instant access to real-time and historical data through advisory systems (such as dashboards and infographics), the users are spared from manual data collection freeing their time for more important tasks.

The data collected is also used for optimization and sustainability efforts in regards to consumables such as energy, water and chemicals. By mapping all production cycles and identifying areas for improvements, Aker BioMarine is able to continue expanding upon its sustainability work as well as improve product quality.

Finally, the Houston maintenance team is able to automatically generate maintenance-related notifications, alarms through rules and analyses of sensor data, allowing them to better monitor and reduce downtime of critical components like pumps, valves, compressors, and boilers.

“Aker BioMarine has more than 3 billion data points in Cognite Data Fusion,” said Ole Thoresen, Director Digitalization & Improvements, Aker BioMarine. “Big data is the next wave of technology in the krill oil market. By utilizing this platform, we are able to solve issues before they arise. We also have the ability to be more sustainable and safe, and that is extremely important in our industry.”

“This data acquisition and data visualization platform is a unique tool that allows us to visualize any trend with time and even superimposed trends with time, something impossible to do before,” said Laurent David, Director of Technology Development Engineering, Aker BioMarine. “With data processing, we will benefit from the huge quantity of mass flow-meter we have in the Houston plant. In the future, we will be able to make daily mass balance, meaning that we will be able to master our daily consumption. In the past we had to wait a month to detect problems and now we have access to daily data. Finally, we will soon have the capability of connecting info from our vessel in Antarctica to the Houston plant.”

About Aker BioMarine

Aker BioMarine is a biotech innovator and Antarctic krill-harvesting company, dedicated to improving human and planetary health. The company develops krill-based ingredients for nutraceutical, aquaculture, and animal feed applications. The company’s fully transparent value chain stretches from sustainable krill harvesting in pristine Antarctic waters through its Montevideo logistics hub, Houston production plant, and all the way to customers around the world. Aker BioMarine is fully owned by Aker ASA, an industrial pioneer since its establishment in 1841.

About Cognite

Cognite is a global software company supporting the full-scale digital transformation of heavy-asset industries around the world. With Cognite Data Fusion (CDF), we supply contextualized data to drive industrial applications that increase safety and efficiency and drive revenue. Cognite Data Fusion liberates a wide variety of industrial data from separate, siloed source systems, then automatically structures the sensor data in relation to the rest (e.g., process diagrams, 3D models, event data). This contextualization step makes data available in a way that’s intuitive to the human user and to the algorithms at work behind the applications revolutionizing industry today. To learn more, visit https://www.cognite.com/ or follow @CogniteData on Twitter or LinkedIn.