Smart Digital Reality

Specialty chemicals have become an indispensable part of the modern world. They play crucial roles in various sectors and industries that range from food & beverage to automotive and construction.

Among the companies leading the way in the specialty chemicals market is the Perstorp Group. With a history spanning 140 years, the company has established itself as a world leader in several segments, such as resins and coatings, engineered fluids and animal nutrition.

But as the company continued to grow and expand globally, it faced a challenge in managing technical information across its production sites.

Different groups of users, from engineers to maintenance and operations staff, needed quick access to relevant information and documents, such as handover documentation, technical drawings, equipment information, or maintenance reports. Yet, this information was managed differently across production sites, leading to inefficiencies and time-consuming efforts to retrieve it.

A next-generation solution that makes lifecycle information readily accessible

To address these challenges, Perstorp found that HxGN SDx® provided the best solution to make lifecycle information readily accessible within a single platform.

"Hexagon provided an attractive technical solution, both in technical and commercial terms. From a technical perspective, HxGN SDx fulfilled our needs for both data and project management. It also supports external collaboration - for example, for EPC contracts," explains Tor Lindström, Director of Asset Integrity at Perstorp.

Perstorp started with a pilot implementation in one of its smaller sites in 2020. After the success of the first phase, HxGN SDx was deployed at one of the company's largest existing sites, located in southern Sweden. In addition, the solution was used from the outset for a greenfield project in India.

From better information management to Smart Digital Reality

Three years later, the benefits of implementing HxGN SDx are clear.

The new solution provides Perstorp teams with a single master location to find all the lifecycle information previously stored in different repositories. Access is now faster and the information is more comprehensive and accurate. This translates to increased efficiency and significant time savings.

As with any major change, moving from a paper-based system to SDx has its challenges, Tor Lindström says.

For example, engineers used to rely on physical binders containing logical drawings sequences. Moving to an object-oriented solution, where designs are represented as collections of digital objects with properties and behaviors, requires a different thinking process, and retrieving information can initially entail a learning curve.

This approach eventually yields significant benefits: "We haven't solved everything yet - but in many areas at stake, such as core documentation or P&ID, it has become much easier to find the right information than before. Not only is it clear where everything is, but the information is interconnected to relate to equipment and tags, which is very efficient. And due to the integration with SAP, it is easy to interface information with SDx," he notes.

On this journey, support from Hexagon’s teams was instrumental: “Our collaboration with Hexagon has been a very good one. Hexagon’s teams are very knowledgeable and support us in an agile and iterative way that fits our step-by-step adoption.”

Read the full case study to know how Hexagon's solution helped Perstorp build its smart digital reality.