With efficient data management, precise information can be obtained to optimize process plants and improve quality. These are the results of a change of the document management system to Comos software that Cognis initiated five years ago.

Cognis belongs to the BASF Group and primarily produces chemical additives, for example, for foodstuffs, cosmetics, and detergents. The company, which employs about 5,500 people and is the world leader in this field, produces 90 percent of its products from renewable raw materials. At its largest production site in Düsseldorf-Holthausen, Cognis operates a number of complex production plants that include high-pressure processing, distillation and cracking, hydration, ethoxylation, sulfonation, drying, and mixing.

These plants undergo constant modernization to continuously increase productivity, safety, and quality – and the modernization process gets more efficient with the quality and accessibility of the plant and process documentation and information.

Düsseldorf-Holthausen is the largest Cognis site (All photos: Cognis)

Objects instead of drawings

In 2006, Cognis decided to fundamentally change its planning and documentation system. The drawing archiving and information system used at that time was organized exclusively in relation to sections and required extensive manual work to generate information and make contexts transparent. After thorough evaluation, Cognis decided to replace the existing system with the innovative Comos software solution. The reason for this was, above all, the object-oriented design of the software that provides all the information on a uniform data platform and therefore enables total plant management. The changeover turned out to be a great challenge, as Andreas Becker, head of tools and standards at Cognis, remembers: “In the beginning, we often thought in terms of drawings and not of objects when structuring the data. Many of our employees had to learn the object-oriented structuring first. However, they did this fairly quickly, so we had already integrated more than 130,000 documents into the Comos database after a few months.”

Andreas Becker (center) and his team use Comos software successfully at Cognis

Intelligent database

The object-oriented structure of Comos led to a great improvement in procedures very quickly. But the learning among the software users also influenced this development. Becker adds: “The better the users’ understanding of Comos, the more specific their demands on the software became. Software adaptations are made, for example, to run a specific query and thus generate valuable information. The software is being improved continuously, benefitting the quality of our work, and we can always rely on good support from Siemens.”

A typical improvement that was achieved with Comos was the administration of approximately 3,500 different drives. Every motor is stored as an object in the database, and all relevant information concerning this motor is accessible with a few mouse clicks. If, for example, an existing motor has to be replaced but another motor type needs to be used as a replacement, little effort is required to check which specific properties a suitable replacement has to have.

Greater efficiency through transparency

“In addition to many small projects, we are currently working on the replacement of discontinued control systems. Up to 300 control loops have to be created for this, plus the plans that describe the disassembly as well as new distributor and outlet plans. By using Comos, we can now realize these plans much faster,” Becker says when asked about the practical advantages achieved with Comos. He also refers to the standardized engineering that the software enables. The object-oriented structure considerably reduces error sources, for example, because information no longer needs to be taken from different drawings.

All the process plants in Düsseldorf-Holthausen are now managed with a uniform database that covers the various units and provides the latest data at all times. In other words, a much wider scope of functions and much higher-quality data management can be achieved without increasing the system costs.

info:

contact: