Have you ever wondered how the future of operational excellence in the chemical industry will be shaped by digital transformation? In this episode of The Chemical Show, Victoria Meyer welcomes guest Stephen Reynolds, Industry Principal for the Chemical Segment at AVEVA, a global leader in industrial software, driving digital transformation and sustainability. Stephen shares his insights into how technology is revolutionizing operational excellence and empowering employees to drive the business forward.
In this episode, Stephen, brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the chemical industry. With 25 years of working as a chemical engineer, Stephen has witnessed the evolution of operational excellence firsthand. Victoria and Stephen discuss the changing landscape of the industry and how companies are becoming leaner, relying on advancements in technology to empower their employees. Stephen delves into the concept of the Connected Worker and how augmented reality and virtual reality tools are transforming how operators on the shop floor access and utilize information. This episode is a must-listen for professionals looking to understand the future of operational excellence in the digital age.
Learn more about the following topics this week:
- Using operational excellence to achieve a higher level of performance
- How the chemical and plastics industry’s approach to operations and operational excellence has evolved
- Bridging the gap of the information through Connected Worker
- What is a digital twin and how do you harness its power?
- The value in digital transformation for small to mid-sized chemical companies.
- Digital assets aiding in sustainability and ESG transparency and accountability
Join us in this insightful episode as we explore the future of operational excellence in the chemical industry. Stephen shares his expertise on how companies are leveraging technology to build a more sustainable and efficient future. From the power of the digital twin concept to the implementation of advanced analytics and AI tools, Stephen provides valuable insights into how technology is revolutionizing the chemical industry.
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Listen to Victoria’s Interview with Stephen Reynolds Here:
Watch Victoria and Stephen’s Discussion on YouTube:
The Future of Operational Excellence is Digital with Stephen Reynolds of AVEVA
Today, I had the pleasure of having a fascinating conversation with Stephen Reynolds, an accomplished chemical engineer from AVEVA. Get ready to dive into the future of operational excellence in the chemical industry as we explore three major topics – the transformative power of digital technology, the journey towards sustainability, and the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies by industry leaders.
The Transformative Power of Digital Technology
In our conversation, Stephen shared how the advent of digital technology has revolutionized the way chemical plants operate. He emphasized the role of connected workers, a concept known as the Connected Worker initiative, in achieving operational excellence. I was particularly intrigued by his mention of augmented and virtual reality tools that provide operators on the shop floor with real-time overlaid information. But does this technology truly empower employees and foster more efficient decision-making processes?
The Journey Towards Sustainability
Sustainability is a hot topic in the chemical industry, and Stephen shed light on the ongoing efforts to reduce carbon emissions and improve waste management. He emphasized the need for companies to monitor and optimize their systems to achieve scope one and two emissions reduction targets. However, my curiosity was piqued when he mentioned the next horizon – managing scope three emissions across the value chain. How are companies sharing data safely and securely to drive sustainability efforts? And how does artificial intelligence play a role in proving that these efforts are making a tangible impact?
Adoption of Industry 4.0 Technologies by Industry Leaders
Industry 4.0 technologies, such as real-time data systems and advanced analytics, are redefining operational excellence across the chemical sector. Stephen explained how technologies like AI, predictive analytics, and the digital twin concept are improving analysis capabilities and decision-making processes. As he described the digital twin’s ability to bring together data from various sources, I couldn’t help but wonder – how is this wealth of information harnessed to empower connected workers? And how can smaller companies, with limited resources, go about implementing these innovative technologies?
In conclusion, my conversation with Stephen Reynolds has shed light on the exciting advancements in operational excellence driven by digital technology, sustainability efforts, and the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies. These topics spark curiosity, urging us to explore further and envision a future where chemical plants thrive in a more connected, sustainable, and efficient manner.
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Transcription for this episode:
The Future of Operational Excellence is Digital with Stephen Reynolds of AVEVA
Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show. This week I am speaking with Stephen Reynolds, who is the Industry Principal for the Chemical Segment at AVEVA. He’s an operations guy who has spent the first part of his 25 year career in manufacturing sites for companies including Rohm & Haas, Sunoco Chemical, and SunCoke Energy before moving to the corporate side of the house. Today at AVEVA, he combines his operations insights with digitization to help companies achieve and improve operational excellence. Stephen is based in Chicago and is an alumnus of two of my favorite universities, Texas A&M and Loyola University Chicago. Stephen. Welcome to The Chemical Show.
Victoria thank you for having me, and thank you for that very excellent introduction.
You’re welcome.
I’m about to keep some of that.
There we go, I’ll send it back over to you. What’s your origin story? What got you interested in chemicals and what really got you into operational excellence?
Well, those are two separate things, really. I’m going to use some school buzzwords that I hear from my daughter. The STEM professionals typically can trace their roots back to a teacher or a school experience, and I think I can do that as well. I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, which may not show up on many maps that people recognize, but we had access to a tremendous education. I just came back from a high school reunion and we got together and talked about the experience that we had, and I can point to the beginning of my chemical engineering adventure to my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Aiken. If he’s listening, thank you. Mr. Aiken was one of those teachers that got you involved early and often, he really just honed your skills every day. I ended up taking two years of chemistry in high school so that by the time I got to college, it was a real no brainer. I can remember Mr. Aiken saying, “Hey, chemistry is great. You’re great at it. You should try engineering because you can go far in that.” 25 years and counting, here I am.
Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
From an operational excellence standpoint, kind of a very similar story, but it falls more to the leadership that I’ve been exposed to and the time I’ve had around them. My first plant manager, we were in a small polymers plant in Southeast Texas, and we loved firefighting. That firefighting mode, that hero aspect of always solving the problem today. He liked to really focus on the difference between firefighting and excellence, and how do you go from one to the other. Other people have called firefighting that catch and release improvement plan, where you find an idea and it’s gone the next day because you’re moving on to the next fire. We really started to preach solving those problems, establishing the operation systems to really facilitate moving from firefighting to excellence so that you didn’t repeat the same fires every day. It’s fine to firefight, let’s just fight different fires. I ended up working for them three different times. So first as a unit engineer, I got involved in his operational excellence operating discipline program at another company, and then followed him finally to SunCoke where I did continuous improvement. So obviously he made an impression and I’ve tried to carry through.
Interesting. It was during my manufacturing days that I also got exposed to operational excellence for the first time. Although, we didn’t call it that. I was an operations manager in charge of a polyethylene unit, and I was leading a reliability team. So our plant manager had implemented a bunch of reliability teams. But again, it’s all about getting to the root cause, about not repeating the same issues, about achieving a higher level of performance and excellence in performance. So that’s really interesting. Tell us a little bit about AVEVA.
Today, AVEVA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Schneider Electric. That gives us the width and breadth behind us to really do great things. AVEVA has a broad portfolio, an incredibly comprehensive portfolio that can help our customers manage their information and data from the beginning of engineering and design through on to the run and maintain of operations, the training of our personnel, and then finally to optimization and sustainability. So it runs the spectrum of those tool sets and customer needs. We’re a global company, so we operate on all continents, with maybe the exception of Antarctica, obviously. We support and implement and guide our customers, hopefully, to success.
Yeah, that’s really cool. I am familiar with a few of AVEVA’s products, but maybe we’ll talk about some of that later, and about where that comes in. There’s a lot of buzz when we start talking about digitization and digital operational experience, which is one of the things we’re going to be talking about today, that we can maybe demystify or expand on more.
Yeah. AVEVA has grown through not only organic engineering and design of their products, but through acquisition as well. I joined AVEVA from OSIsoft who are the makers of the Pi system, which has been around for over 40 years now. I’ve been a customer of them for at least 20 of those. It’s that blending of technologies, building on the foundation of data, and then adding those other applications that AVEVA can provide to really build that comprehensive suite of tools to help our customers.
I had not appreciated how old some of the AVEVA technology is, as you say.
Yes, ma’am.
So you started your career in chemical manufacturing and today you help manufacturing companies. How has the industry’s approach to operations and operational excellence changed over time?
I would say we’ve definitely gotten leaner. Even from my early experience, I hired into an engineering staff of maybe a dozen professionals and through various initiatives and departures, whittled that down to one, which is very difficult to comprehend as a young engineer. Not everybody is that extreme, but I think that’s a growing refrain within the industry. We can’t staff the way we once did. Resources may be remote, they may be external. So how do we manage the flow of information across those boundaries to get the best answers to our people? That flow of information is what’s changing quite a bit, it’s no longer dribbled out on a need to know basis. Leadership is beginning to open some of those gates by sharing real information and insight with our teams. That’s really there to, hopefully, drive decision making to that point of action so that we give people the information they need to make the right decision when they need to make it. So they don’t always have to run it up the leadership chain to get approval or permission. They’re empowered to act. I think as we see the role of technology there, for example there’s an initiative called the Connected Worker. We’re going to talk operational excellence and digital transformation, and it really comes to a point at that Connected Worker initiative because we’ve managed our people, process and technology to a point where they’re at the tip of the activity driving the business
.
So let’s talk about Connected Worker because I do hear that term periodically. When we talk about Connected Worker, is that about the operator at the site or who does it really refer to and then how does it manifest for them to be connected?
Certainly it does extend all the way to the shop floor. So the operators in the field, the growth of augmented reality tools and virtual reality tools can give them that overlay of information. Of course, that’s the future state or the leading edge technology right now. But even so, the handheld devices have access to information so that they can go out to a piece of equipment, get the work history on that, get the current state of operations from not only the field gauges that they see, but from the sensors that are coming into our control systems. If there’s other analytics involved, we can arm them with the tools they need when they’re out in the field. So access to procedures, access to troubleshooting guides, they don’t have to call in it’s just right there at their fingertips. Similarly with our control operators and even our engineers, COVID pushed us into this remote technology age where we can access data from just about anywhere. I can remember as a young engineer being the on call engineer over the weekend or the week, or the holiday, and having to get this bag containing an archaic laptop that had to dial into the network to get access to the data. Now all that’s available from our phone, provided we can set up the cybersecurity. So your expertise can be remote. We have several instances where our customers are building these remote centers to help optimize. The plant may be in Houston, and their expertise might be in Ohio. So how do we bridge the gap of the information that needs to be sent?
Yeah, that’s interesting because I think it used to be when people started talking about and actually building, central control rooms, or having control rooms remote from the site it sounded implausible. It sounded unsafe, it sounded risky. Risky from an operations perspective, from a safety perspective, from a responsiveness perspective. Yet, as you say, technology has really accelerated and made that possible. I guess the experience that we’ve all had of working remotely as a regular piece of our business has changed our mindsets as well.
That will suit our upcoming generation of chemicals workers, whether they’re operators, engineers, or part of the business team. My daughter’s 12 and she’s on her phone 24/7, and that’s just how they interact with people and information. So that won’t even phase them when they get into industry.
You’re right. Even this morning, I printed out something so I could do some edits and do some thinking. My kids don’t do that. They do their thinking on their devices or electronically, and they just have a different comfort level.
Yes, for sure.
Awesome. We started talking about the digital transformation. Really there’s been an element of digitization in manufacturing for years. I think back to even my time in manufacturing, which was a long time ago, we had DCS systems, we talked about statistical process control as a way of managing data. So this has been around for a long time. What’s different today? We’ve talked a little bit about the Connected Worker, but is it beyond that? What’s really different, and how has it evolved?
I have similar experience at that first plant I worked at, I came in just as they were going through a DCS conversion, going from their old pneumatic wall of pins to a DCS. I had an operator swear up and down that they could look at that wall and know exactly how the plant was running. It had been in existence for probably 30 years at that point.
Oh, my god. I remember seeing walls like that and having no idea how they were controlling anything.
That was my first exposure to that transformation. Within two years at that plant, a controls engineer came and was beginning to develop that advanced process control, and operators were embracing it. So the pace of change is very fast. Even with senior people, they realize the facility of it, and off we go. Really that’s what’s changed in the digital age that we’re in, is that rate of change and the access of technology. As the saying goes, back in my day, spreadsheets and the use of excel was the height of innovation in those early years. We had data historians that could connect the DCS to our spreadsheet. We could get our data, manipulate it, do all the analytics, and go. That was considered pretty robust at the time.
Now, our real time data systems take those analytics, put them into the system, manage them, and then we begin connecting the dots. We’ll talk about digital twins and things, but we’re creating that digital representation of our assets, our plant, our business, so that information begins to connect and relate to each other. We can then scale it out and manage the information so that people can step in and understand what’s going on and have access to key decision points. You might hear a phrase edge to cloud. For a long time, we resisted adding more sensors because we didn’t have enough control points in the system. If it’s not needed for control, we can strap on these sensors now and farm the data up to the cloud or remote access into, for example, the Pi system or other historians. The data is there, and it’s fairly inexpensive, so you’re seeing more and more access to information that we’ve not always had. This improves field data, gauges, now we have the barcode systems where we just ping something, and the data is transferred into our handheld, and that can go into our data systems.
So I think the access to data is crucial. The rapid advancement in our ways of analyzing things is what’s really impressive. The pattern recognition, the AI, the predictive analytics. We sell those today. I’ve never used them personally. I’ve walked through demos, I’ve interacted with the software, but I’ve never had to do it. We’ve always had to go, from the historian to the spreadsheet, to try to run those predictive algorithms ourselves. Now those tools do it in real time, and we can see where we’re headed weeks, days, months hopefully, before we get there. I think that’s really crucial. Like I said in the beginning, I’m a longtime customer of the Pi system, and for me as a young engineer, all these different systems were relatively interchangeable. Data historians were just a way to get data. What’s really imbued these systems with power is that digital twin. I think for me, that’s been the real aha moment over the last ten years, being able to contextualize the information and how it relates. This helps us build standard templates and analytics so that it’s no longer plant A’s version of the truth compared to plant B’s. We have that common language. We’re starting to build that single source of truth that we always speak of, so that we can really compare apples to apples. And if there’s an orange in there, we know it. And this is how we make that comparison instead of just trying to feel our way through it.
Okay, so let’s talk digital twins. What is it really? It sounds a little scary, I think about assets and how big and bulky they are, and imagine doing this on a digital basis as a digital twin, it’s kind of mind boggling. But what is it and what value does it offer to the users?
So that question comes up quite a bit, and everybody has a different definition of a digital twin.
Good to know.
Each organization, business unit, or business group will have one. Maintenance systems they have their functional locations broken down by asset, down to the bill of materials, and that’s a digital twin. Our real time systems will have that. We can use that same structure. We can organize it differently based on what we need by asset, by plant, by region, by business, however we want to do it. Financially, if you get into the general ledger there’s different accounts and that’s a financial digital twin. HR has their systems, Safety and Compliance have their ways of reporting and managing information. So digital twin for me is really just that representation of how the data relates together and how do we organize it from these data sources into a meaningful, useful way. Within our system, we have standard practices, but each customer has their way of organizing their information and connecting the dots through their system. We just help them get there faster.
So I’ll just tell you where my brain goes when I think about a digital twin. I think of it in some ways as, again, if you’re looking at the control system and on the control board, you can see the different pieces of equipment, the flows, the ins and outs, the pressures, temperatures and all the data that you have of what you’re doing. Is it that, or is it much more about decision scenarios?
Well, it starts with that, for example, within our Pi system, that’s how we might define a pump. And these are all the digital points that define this pump. We will connect it to our asset information systems to bring in the contextual, the manufacturer data, the control limits, those types of information. So we’ll have what we call a pump and a number of pumps, compressors, reactors, and vessels will combine to form an operating unit, and then the operating unit will combine to form a plant, the plant’s enterprise and beyond. That’s the basic of the data. How we use that data is really the power of the digital twin.
So you mentioned decision making, the digital twin empowers or enables rapid dissemination of information, so you’re no longer having to look at everything. I can remember those early DCS’s where you had to flip every darn screen, until finally we developed that alarm panel or the exception panel. We do the same with the digital twin. We’re trying to manage by exception so that as this data combines, we can see that total picture of whether it’s performance around a unit, a business, or an asset. We have the information that says, there’s an anomaly here and we need to go act. I think that’s really the power of the twin, bringing all this to bear for better decisions.
Back to the connected worker, we do all this hunting and pecking digitally so that they don’t have to. Think about your engineering days, if you had a problem with a pump, you had to go to the maintenance shed, find the file room, dig through a dusty old filing cabinet that may or may not open without some assistance. Water may have gotten in there or rats, or dirt. You’re not even guaranteed to find the right information. Now digitally, we connect the dots so that digital twin carries forward from your real time operations all the way back to your engineering documentation, if that’s needed.
Awesome. It feels like a really big undertaking, both from a financial perspective, a people perspective, resources, and time which then makes me say, how do people justify this? How are companies justifying the investment of time, resources, individuals, and everything else as they go through this digital transformation?
You hit on the key word, investment. Very often these projects are rolled into a cost center. They’re an operating cost or some new gadget that we’re trying out. So they don’t see that as an investment towards the future. That’s really what digital transformation is, it’s an investment. It’s an extension of that operational excellence into that next thing. We’ve taken people and process improvement as far as we can, we need digital transformation to take it to the next level. So it’s an investment. Like you say, it’s a resource problem.
The bigger companies have the people and assets to really throw at some of these initiatives, while some of the smaller plants don’t. So it’s about change management and identifying that need for change. We don’t want to be a solution looking for a problem, so part of our trusted advisor goal is to help our customers understand what they’re really trying to do, what they need to achieve, and then coming up with the capabilities that they may need. It’s not one size fits all. Not everyone’s going to race ahead to that virtual plant in the sky. Many of our plants or our customers just need access to the information, visibility into the process, and they’re able to identify 80% of their problems.
So I think one part is finding that need for transformation, COVID is an example of that. We went remote, and so people were not always coming in or accessible to the plant to help. How do we solve that? People have been asking us about visualization, remote access and just getting that visibility into the data. So that was a big need for change. For years, it’s always been cost driven. People will say “I really need access to optimize our process. So you mentioned SPC that was driven at minimizing waste and minimizing transitions, optimizing yields. How do we get the biggest bang for our buck within our process?” Asset reliability has always been a challenge. In a lot of these petrochemical facilities, there’s very valuable assets that are very expensive to fix, very expensive to repair, require downtime and all that. Enough of those failures pop up, and you’re going to install vibration monitoring, you’re going to install predictive analytics to get ahead of this and drive this improvement so that you can stop firefighting and move on to excellence. That’s where these tools really come in.
Yeah, that’s helpful It seems like a lot of this digital transformation is really being enacted by the biggest companies with the biggest investment base, the deepest pockets if you will. There’s a perception from mid-sized companies and smaller companies that digital transformation isn’t for them, and that maybe the value is not there. The economics don’t work. When you’re working off a smaller investment pool or operating fund, it doesn’t feel like it fits. How do you respond to that? What do you see happening?
Well, you’re right the chemical industry is slow to change. We see a broad spectrum of technology adopters, the leaders out there like Dow, Cavestro or BASF are out there innovating. Dow, their goal was to eliminate confined space entry with the use of Industry 4.0 technologies, whether it’s drones and virtual inspections, or advanced analytics. But even they will concede that they have pockets of excellence. So they are testing these technologies, and improving them where they can and when there’s capability to achieve some of these. But they’ll concede that the solution is not universal yet. They haven’t implemented it at the deepest, darkest plant in middle of nowhere. So when we talk to these smaller customers, that’s what we tell them. Yes, there are leaders out there doing these great things, but they haven’t licked everything. Their solutions may not be your solutions. We like to preach the “start simple but simply start” mantra. I didn’t coin that phrase that came from one of our customers.
That’s a great phrase, I’m making note.
It comes down to understanding that need that you have and being able to manage that change. What do you need to do and what are you prepared and ready to do? A lot of these technologies require information and data, and some of these plants have a low digital footprint because they make low margin products that don’t warrant that investment. They’ve been doing it well for many years, and so they haven’t felt the need to do some of these things. Now they’re coming up with new reasons to do this, and that’s where the edge technology allows that bolt on sensors.
For the smaller companies and the ones that are just starting their journey, it’s really about finding that investment need. Think big, but start small, “fail small” is another great tagline that I’ve heard. So you can explore the technology, invest in quick wins, demonstrate it, get that value, and that helps sell it not only to the people that have to embrace the change, but also to the leadership that has to write the checks for it. They see that sunk cost initially, but we prove out some value and then we have money to proceed to the next phase. So it becomes that investment strategy of we’ll make and go.
Everyone’s journey is different. Not everyone has that big oil money to go all in all at once. So there are companies that will take years, if not a decade, to say, “Okay, we’ve established our data foundation, we’ve understood how it relates to each other, we’ve solved these problems and we’re doing really well. But we think we can get more from this. We have this pump or asset that’s not performing the way it should. Let’s invest now in these predictive technologies or the AI tools to bring it all together. We don’t have the support system we once did, our resources all sit off site at some corporate location. How do we share that data?” That’s kind of how the system just grows organically as the needs change and as the desire really changes.
Yeah, makes sense. I like what you said about establishing the data foundation. You need to start somewhere and this is something I talk to companies about, along with a number of facets of the transformations that the industry is going through. We’ve got a number of transformations taking place at the same time digitization, sustainability, and so on. Start somewhere, you figure out what your foundation is, establish your foundation and your baseline, and then you keep moving. So ESG and sustainability are key themes we talk about a lot on The Chemical Show. It is everywhere you look when you turn on the news or talk to people. What does this mean to AVEVA and its customers?
Well, I’ve talked about this at length with my boss. He’s a tad older than me and has been doing this a little longer but we came to the conclusion that these tools have always supported sustainability. We just called them something different. So whether it’s reliable supply, asset reliability, waste reduction, energy management, compliance we just never had that umbrella term before. Of course sustainability encompasses more than just those basics. Those are just, as my wife might say, table stakes. We have these net zero initiatives out there for carbon reduction. Circularity is a very new burgeoning technology where we’re taking these products, and recycling them back into our value chain. It’s no longer just mechanical recycling, it’s chemical recycling, bringing it back to the raw materials so that we can make something new again. That is where the forefront of the technology is really changing to adapt.
We still do all the basics of monitoring and maintaining optimization and performance. So your energy management translates to emissions and safer operation. Our equipment is lasting longer, we’re taking care of it better so that we don’t always have to go and junk that pump. It lasts longer, we rebuild it. The wear and tear is not as bad as it once was, so we’re operating in a more sustainable manner. Companies are changing their assets out to be more environmentally friendly in that regard, whether it’s carbon capture or scrubbers. How do we monitor and optimize those systems? A lot of talk has been given to scope one and scope two emissions and that’s really our bread and butter of optimization as engineers and the data systems we have today. I think what you’re going to start seeing now is that community of data.
The scope three that is everything else, our suppliers, our customers, how that carbon emission is managed across our value chain and being able to share that data and access it across those different legal entities in a safe and intellectual proprietary way is really going to be that next horizon for cloud data. Along with how we manage it and access it through the AI and being able to capture those components and really prove that we’re not just talking about it, we’re actually doing it.
The community of data becomes really critical for the industry, particularly as we look at scope three, because scope three is the biggest impact that many companies and value chains have. So it will be good to see how this evolves and transforms.
We’ve done it for years. From that optimization standpoint, you’re seeing these solutions begin to get baked in. From an engineering side, looking at our simulations, these emissions now are part of the model. So the greenhouse gas calculations, you design it, and these models are going to take a stab at what your footprint is. Planning tools where we look at how we’re going to manage our raw materials now include not only raw materials, but some of these greenhouse gas calculations and what power sources you’re going to use. So your carbon footprint and the pricing model can change whether you’re using the coal generation, electricity, wind, or other renewables. So that all that comes to play, how you run your business. I think that baked in awareness to sustainability is really what’s being developed now.
And the digital assets help drive that transparency, information, and decision making.
Back to the digital twin, connecting the dots from that simulation and model, to your real time performance, to your planning and optimization expectations allows that seamless communication of information. Then, because it’s a digital representation, we can scale out to more and more facilities and across that business community.
That’s very cool. So Stephen, this has been really good and interesting conversation here. What’s next for you and for AVEVA as we play out the rest of 2023 and into 2024? What should we be looking for?
For me, I enjoy the work, I enjoy the job. I’ll continue to be an evangelist for the operational excellence and digital transformation. As I tell my customers, I no longer have a plant of my own, so please allow me to help with yours. For AVEVA, you’ll continue to see development across our portfolio. We’re coming together as a singular AVEVA now, trying to desilo some of our toolkits and portfolio items. So I think you’ll see tighter integration across not only our suite of tools, but into that value chain. The next frontier is cloud and AI. So you’ll continue to see developments growing there, not only through our foundation, but through our technical partner sphere. Then the final thing, I would invite everyone if you’re interested, AVEVA World is coming up in San Francisco in October. So you’re welcome to join us there and come see what new releases are on the horizon and where we’re headed.
Awesome. Although I got to say, Stephen, it’s going to be a tough decision because The Chemical Summit overlaps with AVEVA World. So maybe people can tag team and go from one to the next.
Yep, that’s right.
Well, thank you for this. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I appreciate you joining us today.
Victoria, thank you for your time, and thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Absolutely, and thanks everyone for reading. Keep reading, following, and sharing, and we will talk to you again soon.
About Stephen Reynolds:
Stephen Reynolds is the Industry Principal for the Chemical Segment at AVEVA. He is based in Chicago, IL and holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M. He has 25-years of experience as a chemical engineer, beginning as a unit engineer in a small polymers plant, his industry roles have since evolved to include unit engineering, operations excellence facilitation, operations management, and continuous improvement management. Stephen has worked with AVEVA for five years spending time in the center of excellence and customer success groups before joining the Industry team. Stephen has also recently completed his MBA at Loyola University Chicago.
Want to learn more about Operational Excellence?
Check out Episode 82 with John Yagel, where John shares insights about the evolution of operaitonal excellence over the past 30 years and how they apply to a chemical and materials company: The Importance of Operational Excellence with John Yagel
Also, learn from former Dow and Shell executive Sam Smolk in Episode 87: In Daily Pursuit of Excellence with Sam Smolik