Air Liquide to accelerate digital transformation

The Enterprise Agreement Programme will enable Alizent to deploy OSIsoft’s PI System broadly across Air Liquide’s operations to optimise production, minimise environmental impacts and improve logistics, among other services.

In 2015, Air Liquide launched the Smart and Innovative (SIO) programme to improve the way the company serves its customers through the coordination of plant operations and centralised control centres.

Alizent, an Air Liquide entity dedicated to Industrial IoT, digitally connects its clients’ workforce and customers with their assets to create efficiencies, generate new revenues and elevate customer satisfaction.

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Alizent, for instance, tracks more than 22 million gas canisters, beer kegs and other mobile assets to reduce losses and optimise inventory. It also manages more than 20,000 remote facilities such as bulk tanks for industrial gases to reduce service costs and supervises over 250 production facilities to improve their performance and maintenance.

OSIsoft’s PI System serves as the operational data infrastructure for the SIO programme, collecting, visualising and transforming critical asset data into insight for the teams of the SIO remote centres, notably in France, China and Kuala Lumpur, for real-time decision support and conducting analytics. Air Liquide’s industrial operations generate over one billion data points per day.

“We work with OSIsoft because it has long been a leader in turning critical operations data into a true asset employees can use. By combining Big Data with human intelligence, the workflow of each Air Liquide production unit linked to an SIO centre is adapted in real-time to the changing needs of customers,” explained Alexis Duret, CEO of Alizent.

“Capable of controlling sites remotely, these SIO centres can optimise production unit energy efficiency and leverage predictive analytics to ensure continuous facility run time. By integrating these digital tools, Air Liquide facilitates decision making to improve its operational excellence and provide best-in-class customer experiences.”

Under the OSIsoft Enterprise Agreement Programme, Air Liquide employees will be able to further accelerate the roll out of new enterprise-wide use cases, strategically improve real-time data management at scale and tap into new sources of data.

Engineered to unleash creativity, OSIsoft Enterprise Agreement program, software and services accelerate time-to-value and unlock access to data in a more efficient way than a project-by-project approach.

“Data is the one commodity in the world that becomes more valuable the more it can be shared,” said J. Patrick Kennedy, CEO and founder of OSIsoft. “We think Air Liquide’s accomplishments form a blueprint for how heavy industry will evolve, and how relationships with customers will evolve, over the next decade.”