The world’s leading supplier of catalysts, technologies and services for the chemical and refining industries, Topsoe, formerly Haldor Topsoe, headquartered in Denmark, serves customers around the world. By further developing chemical processes, the company enables its customers to successfully switch to renewable energies. The plant manufacturer, electrolysis and catalyst expert with around 2,100 employees is significantly involved in the green energy transition.
Moon landing for engineering
© TopsoeCIO Niels Keller-Larsen
With AUCOTEC’s Engineering Base (EB) platform, Topsoe has ushered in a new era of digital, collaborative engineering. “The introduction of this system is a crucial milestone in our digital transformation,” explained CIO Niels Keller-Larsen at the
go-live. “With EB, our work is finally truly data-driven, across all engineering phases and disciplines on one data model!” he emphasized. The switch to the platform is Topsoe’s largest transformation project to date. “The equivalent of a moon landing for us,” said the top IT manager. As a knowledge base for all participants, EB supports projects from their “birth” to the very end and offers customers a continuous customer journey. EB also unified Topsoe’s system landscape and standardized engineering; numerous discipline-specific tools were replaced. According to the CIO, the transformation would not have been possible with them. As a single source of truth, EB also lays the foundation for the use of AI.
Partnership efficiency drivers
Another reason for Topsoe’s decision in favour of EB was to have to commission as few special solutions as possible. Instead, a number of new developments have been worked out in collaboration that are now a standard part of EB’s plant licence, and thus benefit all customers: for example, EBML for faster data exchange or Asset 360’s automatic data sheets, both of which are important efficiency drivers for EPCs, plant manufacturers and operators. According to Keller-Larsen: “We wanted a partner, not a supplier. Implementation and pilot project have shown that this has been successful.”
Six weeks instead of six months
Topsoe’s transformation process was extensive and very democratic. “Never before have we brought so much competence and knowledge together,” says the CIO. Everyone had to rethink, but now they have a uniform “data home” for all engineering and maintenance tasks. This increases flexibility and saves around 10 per cent of the costs. Thanks to considerable acceleration – some work now takes six weeks instead of six months – significantly more projects can be completed in the same amount of time in future, Niels Keller-Larsen is pleased to say.
