Covestro is driving forward the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the company as well as throughout the entire chemical industry. As part of these efforts, the company is conducting several pilot projects across different divisions to investigate digital technologies to make processes efficient and sustainable.
Optimize the Manufacturing Process
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With the help of artificial intelligence, we will be able to find digital solutions across departmental boundaries in the future that were not possible before. This opens up completely new possibilities to achieve greater sustainability with improved resource utilization and thus to serve the needs of our customers even more precisely,” said Sucheta Govil, chief commercial officer of Covestro.
At the Dormagen production site, Covestro is testing to optimize the manufacturing process for polyesters. Polyesters are needed to produce polyurethanes. The use of artificial intelligence in the processing of the company’s comprehensive process data is intended to create free production capacities and minimize energy consumption. Digital technologies are also used in Dormagen and at the Leverkusen and Krefeld-Uerdingen sites to predict the peak steam consumption of production plants. In this way, energy consumption and costs can be reduced in the long term.
Another project deals with the digital customer experience. Machine learning is used to help to identify potential customers for Covestro at all digital touch points on the Internet and social media. The aim is to win them over as customers in the long term through consultation and information. Artificial intelligence will also be used in Covestro’s purchasing department in the future. Faulty invoices can then be identified with less effort, making the invoicing acknowledgement process much more efficient.
Utilizing Data Science and Machine Learning
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AI is a fascinating opportunity for Covestro worldwide. The ongoing projects show that data and its proper use not only make the entire industry smarter and faster, but can also contribute to the bottom line,” said Nils Janus, head of advanced analytics at Covestro.
To make optimum use of data-based findings in the future, the materials manufacturer has developed the Covestro Analytics Platform (CAP), a platform for data scientists. CAP collects raw data from production plants, research results, and business processes and supplements it with external databases to perform analyses and train machine learning models.
Source: Covestro