Case Study: Ashland achieves 95% GMP on-target production with TrendMiner self-service industrial analytics

How self-service industrial analytics supports the transformation and digitalization of Ashland’s chemical processing plant

Ashland, a $5 billion US-based specialty chemicals company, faced the challenge of converting its Doel, Belgium plant from construction-grade products to pharmaceutical-grade production—requiring lower throughput, tighter process control and strict GMP compliance—while making sense of large volumes of process data. To stabilize production and empower plant engineers, Ashland implemented TrendMiner’s self-service industrial analytics platform on top of their AspenTech historian to enable easy analysis of historical and live process data.

TrendMiner’s platform allowed engineers to find hidden root causes by filtering for stable runs, create monitoring “Golden Fingerprints,” and receive alerts to prevent recurring incidents, all without heavy IT involvement. As a result, TrendMiner helped solve previously unsolvable production issues, improve quality and control, and increase on-target GMP production from 70% to 95%, while paving the way for real-time monitoring and prediction.

Ashland

Jan Meireleire

Engineering Manager