Further measures for the digitization of processes

Chem­i­cal com­pa­ny Röhm has dig­i­tized its process­es with the help of Shift­con­nec­tor, soft­ware from glob­al soft­ware provider eschbach, achiev­ing sus­tain­able improve­ments in safe­ty, qual­i­ty and productivity.

Röhm is a lead­ing glob­al sup­pli­er of methacry­late prod­ucts — includ­ing the Plex­i­glas brand. With 15 pro­duc­tion sites on four con­ti­nents, the com­pa­ny sup­plies impor­tant future mar­kets such as auto­mo­tive, the elec­tron­ics indus­try and med­ical tech­nol­o­gy — and has recent­ly start­ed rely­ing on Shift­con­nec­tor, the soft­ware solu­tion from eschbach.

Digitally supported shift transfer for more safety and productivity

Shift­con­nec­tor is a Plant Process Man­age­ment (PPM) soft­ware solu­tion devel­oped specif­i­cal­ly for the chem­i­cal indus­try. It net­works the work­force of pro­duc­tion plants work­ing in a 24/7 shift sys­tem with each oth­er and ensures smooth com­mu­ni­ca­tion, as well as trans­paren­cy and trace­abil­i­ty, espe­cial­ly dur­ing crit­i­cal shift handovers.

“After the spin-off from the Evonik Group in 2019, we pushed ahead with dig­i­ti­za­tion in our company.”

- Dr. Hans-Peter Hauck, COO

For the dig­i­ti­za­tion projects in the pro­duc­tion area, the plants were sur­veyed to deter­mine the actu­al needs. In addi­tion, a mar­ket analy­sis was car­ried out with the help of a con­sul­tant and Shift­con­nec­tor from eschbach was intro­duced at Röhm worldwide.

The PPM soft­ware from eschbach offers com­pa­nies a cen­tral plat­form on which all pro­duc­tion-rel­e­vant and process-relat­ed infor­ma­tion con­verges. With inter­faces to both the plants and the employ­ees in pro­duc­tion, Shift­con­nec­tor suc­ceeds in bring­ing togeth­er process data and infor­ma­tion sta­tus­es of employ­ees as well as their know-how cen­tral­ly, so that all lev­els — from man­age­ment to plant and shift man­age­ment to plant oper­a­tors — have rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion at their dis­pos­al at all times.

Decentralized implementation successfully carried out globally

The imple­men­ta­tion of Shift­con­nec­tor was not con­trolled cen­tral­ly from head­quar­ters, but placed in the hands of local project man­age­ment, which proved to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly effi­cient approach. In addi­tion, the entire roll­out could be car­ried out online, which con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the fast and sus­tain­able suc­cess. Where indi­vid­ual employ­ees in pro­duc­tion used to trav­el around with pen, paper and cam­era, a tablet is now suf­fi­cient to trans­fer entries from shift rounds to the PPM sys­tem with just a few clicks, for example.

The feed­back from the end users is con­sis­tent­ly pos­i­tive: “Shift­con­nec­tor is also very help­ful when ana­lyz­ing anom­alies and prob­lems in ongo­ing pro­duc­tion,” says plant man­ag­er Dr. Sibylle Strandt. “The order­ly merg­ing of process data from the plant with the infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the employ­ees makes root cause research and prob­lem solv­ing much eas­i­er.” And Hauck adds, “Plat­form has made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to improv­ing the qual­i­ty, safe­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of our processes.”