Siemens plans to acquire Process Systems Enterprise

Siemens is plan­ning to acquire Process Sys­tems Enter­prise (PSE), a tech­nol­o­gy- lead­ing glob­al sup­pli­er of soft­ware and ser­vices for advanced process mod­el­ling. Advanced mod­els are used with­in dig­i­tal R&D, design and oper­a­tions in the process indus­tries to help make fast, safe and more effi­cient deci­sions through rapid and effec­tive explo­ration of the deci­sion space. PSE offers mod­el-based solu­tions that span the entire process life­cy­cle via a uni­fied and inte­grat­ed set of tools. This pro­vides a wide range of state-of-the-art mod­el-based solu­tions that strong­ly com­ple­ment the Siemens port­fo­lio in the process indus­try sec­tor and will also fur­ther strength­en Siemens’ posi­tion as a lead­ing provider in com­pre­hen­sive plant man­age­ment over the entire lifecycle.

The tech­nol­o­gy is wide­ly used in the chem­i­cals, petro­chem­i­cals, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and food and bev­er­age indus­tries to accel­er­ate inno­va­tion, improve process design and oper­a­tion, stream­line R&D and man­age tech­nol­o­gy risk. “The com­bi­na­tion of high-fideli­ty pre­dic­tive mod­els and real-time process data play an increas­ing­ly impor­tant role in the dig­i­tal­iza­tion of oper­a­tions in the process indus­try. It is impor­tant to take the process knowl­edge that is already avail­able in prod­uct and process devel­op­ment and to map it in pre­dic­tive mod­els, which can then be used to add val­ue in the dig­i­tal­iza­tion envi­ron­ment in every step of the life­cy­cle,” states Eckard Eber­le, CEO of Busi­ness Unit Process Automa­tion. “PSE helps us sig­nif­i­cant­ly here, because now we can inte­grate mod­el-based tech­nolo­gies from PSE in our appli­ca­tions in the entire plant life­cy­cle. This makes us even bet­ter equipped to meet the spe­cif­ic require­ments of our cus­tomers.” Costas Pan­telides, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of PSE, says: “We are delight­ed to become part of the Siemens orga­ni­za­tion. Our tech­nol­o­gy and know-how are high­ly com­ple­men­tary to Siemens’ exist­ing prod­ucts, and our com­bined port­fo­lio will build on Siemens’ already strong posi­tion in dig­i­tal­iza­tion in the process indus­tries, to deliv­er unprece­dent­ed ben­e­fits to our cus­tomers through­out the process and prod­uct lifecycle.”

The com­pa­ny has already been work­ing with PSE suc­cess­ful­ly since June 2018 with­in a strate­gic part­ner­ship. As part of this ini­tia­tive, new mod­el-based solu­tions have been devel­oped: for plant per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing and fore­cast­ing, soft sens­ing, real-time opti­miza­tion, non­lin­ear mod­el-pre­dic­tive con­trol and oper­a­tor train­ing based on detailed process mod­els. These solu­tions are based on the pow­er­ful com­bi­na­tion of process mod­els, which con­tain in-depth process knowl­edge, with real-time and his­tor­i­cal process data. This pro­vides the plant oper­a­tor with effi­cien­cy and effec­tive­ness gains by improve process con­trol and main­te­nance plan­ning, e.g. by pre­dict­ing cat­a­lyst lifes­pans or coke build-up in furnaces.

The firm plans to pur­chase 100 per­cent of the share cap­i­tal of PSE and to inte­grate its busi­ness into the Busi­ness Unit Process Automa­tion, which is part of Siemens Dig­i­tal Indus­tries. The Lon­don-based com­pa­ny employs about 160 peo­ple world­wide. Clos­ing of the trans­ac­tion is planned for the fourth quar­ter of 2019. Both com­pa­nies have agreed not to com­ment on the finan­cial details of the transaction.