ERM

Background

ERM is a leading global provider of environmental, health, safety, risk, social consulting and sustainability-related services. They work with the world's leading organizations, delivering innovative solutions and helping them to understand and manage their sustainability challenges. They employ more than 5,500 people in over 40 countries. ERM’s vision is to demonstrably add value to their customers. They aim to have a greater impact on the sustainability challenges that face our planet and society.

A Visionary Approach

ERM was engaged in a customer project involving the active remediation of a Superfund site. Their role was to provide end-to-end facility and water treatment site services, including the operations and maintenance of all water treatment technologies such as pumps, wells, and water treatment system processes. ERM project team members included on-site engineers along with remote domain experts, data scientists and project managers.

The Challenge

The geographically dispersed team’s previous technology platform required a number of different data collection, analysis and reporting approaches based on asset types and locations. Much manual work was involved in team communication, analysis, decision making and ultimately in creating necessary regulatory reports, consuming time and resources.

The ERM team hypothesized that using predictive analytics would speed information capture, vastly reduce the amount of time spent in analysis, provide better transparency into overall project operations, reduce unforeseen operations and maintenance issues, and enable a move to a proactive operating model thus providing a cleaner environment more quickly.

The Solution

ERM teamed with TwinThread, using its Predictive Operations Center to unify disparate data into one operating platform. The platform utilizes dashboards, alerts, KPI reporting, allowing rapid assessment and corrective actions, all in real-time. ERM domain experts, data scientists, and program managers all operate from one common platform, regardless of their location, quickly determining appropriate corrective actions. Once those actions are verified the team uses TwinThread to scale corrections to every part of the project within minutes.

The Result

Within two months, this service provider drove their vision to reality and achieved hard economic benefits including:

• Within 30 days data flowing from site pumping and monitoring wells, expanding real-time visibility past field engineers to the project team around the world
• Time to Action Reduced from Two Weeks to One Day
• 30% reduction in time required to complete reporting and analysis
• Uncovered investment opportunities in new pumps and wells where required
• Significantly reduced asset and system downtime with proactive and actionable analytics

Said Brendan Robinson, ERM Partner and Engineer,

"Prior to TwinThread supporting us, we were bogged down in trying to access our data streams and overwhelmed by the volume of data. Our ability to build threads and conduct real-time data analysis of plant operations has reduced our operationalized decision-making time from weeks to less than a day. This allows us to avoid unnecessary plant shutdowns and optimize our available resources in a rapidly changing environment."

TwinThread’s platform enabled ERM’s team to learn faster, achieve results faster, and to then translate those gains to their global team faster. They are now evaluating using TwinThread’s platform in other remediation projects globally.