Commenting on its new initiatives, Henrik Hahn, head of Evonik Digital, told The Chemical Engineer: “When it comes to digitalisation I see basically two focal areas for Evonik: generate growth through new business and achieve efficiency gains from existing processes. In fact, Evonik has many data repositories. For example, our production sites generate a lot structured and unstructured process data. Together with IBM we want to tap into such data lakes generating meaningful insights.”
“IBM has a full range of enabling technologies,” Hahn said. “We want to utilise these internally and externally. For example, this can help us to get faster relevant findings in the research and development area. We can also more effectively address customer-applied, technology-related questions and provide targeted solutions.”
A second partnership has been formed with Germany’s University of Duisberg-Essen that will focus on the human side of digitalisation, including tailored industrial training and knowledge transfer.
Evonik formed a digital subsidiary in 2016 and tasked its multi-disciplinary team with working fast, flexibly and with a high degree of freedom to develop novel digital concepts, test them and implement them within the group.
In May, Hahn spoke exclusively to The Chemical Engineer about setting up Evonik Digital and his expectations for digitalisation at the company.
