South Korea’s Hanwha Total Petrochemical Co. has tapped into big data to boost factory safety and efficiency through smart management.

The Korean petrochemical company said Wednesday it has deployed the Asset Information Portal (AIP) system on its Daesan plant in South Chungcheong province.

The new online portal is the result of an 18-month effort and contains information on more than 300,000 facilities at the Daesan plant, including design blueprints, qualifications and maintenance history.

Workers can now access this vast array of information on a single portal site, which is expected to significantly boost safety and operational efficiency, Hanwha Total said. The company expects the new system to save 32,000 working hours and cut 2.2 billion won ($1.84 million) in costs every year.

Hanwha Total’s Daesan complex includes a naphtha cracking center and facilities to produce various chemical products such as paraxylene and styrene monomer.

A petrochemical factory has many production equipments that require regular maintenance. But because information so far had been generally scattered throughout departments, facility checkup was often a time-consuming process, Hanwha Total said.

“Now if there’s a defect in a particular equipment, workers can simply look it up on the AIP system and find out its entire repair history,” said a company official.

The data portal is part of Hanwha Total’s ambitious digitalization initiative.

In 2014, it introduced an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that consolidated the process of gathering and organizing company-wide business data through an integrated software suite. In 2017, it invested 30 billion won in a three-year project to transition its plant to a smart factory, installing a wireless network across the site to improve connectivity through internet-of-things technology.

By Won Ho-sup and Kim Hyo-jin

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