Founded in 1909, W.R. Grace is a $2 billion dollar technology leader in specialty chemicals. Grace specializes in refining technologies, specialty catalysts and materials technologies. Grace is headquartered in their million square foot plant in Curtis Bay, Maryland and has sites all over the world.

Grace had an adequate OT system but no good way to analyze it. Challenges were many including difficulty with multiple process tags in one graph. Engineers could access simple information only, with minimal manipulation. Only engineering was using their current system, no operators or managers. Grace’s current system was limited. Only poor manipulation of data was possible. The system was archaic and hard to use with little operator buy in. Grace had hundreds of users for the current OT systems and limited licenses. IT system integration was non-existent with the following systems located in their own data islands.

After dataPARC was deployed, sitewide buy in became a reality The It and the OT world finally came together at Grace and there was no need to remove or replace any of the current systems. There was now one user interface and nobody had to go chasing after data. More people understood the system therefore more IT/ OT integration occurred. The overall asset performance improved. Reports were generated and the evaluation of process upsets were no longer based on hunches, but on actual data.