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Dow Achieves Global Process Efficiency and Operational Excellence with Synergis Adept Engineering Document Management

Company overview: 

Dow's ambition is to become the most innovative, customer centric, inclusive and sustainable materials science company in the world. Their portfolio of plastics, industrial intermediates, coatings, and silicones businesses delivers differentiated, science-based products and solutions for its customers

Goals

  • Maintain the highest Six Sigma adoption and operational excellence.
  • Ensure efficiency and safety for all standard operating procedures and plant documentation.
  • Manage millions of documents across the globe for both new capital projects and as-built engineering documents.
  • Create superior documentation to reduce risk and gain insight for analysis of field issues.
  • Ensure high quality, searchable metadata in all as-built engineering documents.
  • Provide greater protection for intellectual property.
  • Enable global collaboration on every continent.
  • Accelerate post-project data handover.

Dow personnel emphasize consistent work process execution across all sites around the world. We have a sizable investment in written best practices for process design, project execution and plant operation that provide a significant and sustainable competitive advantage for Dow.

Gregg Schuler Former Product Manager for Data Integration and Engineering Document Management

Challenges

  • Usability / support issues with existing 20+ different document management systems.
  • Serious gaps in usability, security, reliability, and performance.
  • Misplaced as-built documents with potential of using outdated documents.
  • No single point of access to engineering documents for global document access.
  • Poor collaboration  and inefficiencies amongst people and teams.
  • All plant engineering documents lacked consistent metadata, making it difficult to search for the right version.

Our document management initiative started because a Six Sigma project identified gaps and problems with our storage of as-built documents. We had usability issues, constrained access, and limited ability to collaborate across sites; and inefficiencies because we could not quickly find the right document versions.

Solution

  • Deploy commercial, centrally supported document management system software to improve document availability, security, maintenance,  and sharing.
  • Provide a single portal for all global users to quickly access as-built engineering documents via high quality, searchable metadata.
  • Ensure continued, uninterrupted, efficient access to the millions of documents that represent how Dow’s plants were built.
  • Bring global expertise quickly and easily to any of Dow’s local sites.

Adept has value in increasing the speed of projects. That can be extremely significant. Time to market is critical for market-facing businesses.

Barbara Migl Senior Maintenance and Engineering IT Manager

Results

  • Adept manages over $5B worth of Dow intellectual property across all global sites.
  • Dow’s work with Adept provides a model for others to improve their own efficiency, reduce costs, lower risk, and speed time to market.
  • Adept increases the speed of projects, improves collaboration across sites, and speeds time to market.
  • Adept centralizes all plant engineering documents into a single environment with consistent metadata.
  • At a high level, Adept reduce costs and accelerates project schedules.
  • Adept’s flexibility to handle a wide range of document management scenarios is changing how Dow does business.
  • Adept provides important business results for Dow through centrally unified information and more consistent processes.
  • Dow’s adoption of Adept has expanded to new sites, new plants, and new departments, and many more documents and document types have been added to Adept, beyond the original scope.

By consistently finding the latest document version, site and central engineers can more efficiently use capital, reduce errors and related rework, and ultimately accelerate project startup by 1-2 days.

Gregg Schuler Former Product Manager for Data Integration and Engineering Document Management

Ready to explore Adept and join the Synergis family?

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