The first Axens plant to deploy Optimistik's OIAnalytics solution, the Salindres site in southern France brought its production, lab and sensor data together on a single platform. The result: dashboards across its production units, substantial economic gains, and strong buy-in from production, maintenance and process teams.
Axens, a subsidiary of IFP Energies nouvelles, designs and manufactures catalysts and adsorbents for refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, gas, alternative fuels, plastics recycling and water treatment. Its subsidiary Eurecat supports operators across the entire catalyst life cycle: activation, regeneration and recycling.
The group's largest catalyst and adsorbent production site, the Salindres plant in southern France employs 420 people. It exports 95% of its output, mainly to major chemical companies.
Axens plants are committed to improving performance, operational excellence, energy efficiency and the shift to low-carbon energy sources. Their action plans rely on three levers: investment in industrial assets, advanced control of material and energy consumption, and process optimization.
Data is central to the last two levers. In Salindres, the main goal was to improve the site's economic performance through three metrics: yields, equipment reliability and productivity.
The starting point was typical of the process industries: plenty of data, but scattered. Production data, lab results and readings from sensors on the production lines each lived in its own system.
“The idea was to bring all this data onto a single platform so we could combine it and take our process analysis a step further.” (translated from French) — Maxime Montillet, Plant Manager, Axens (Salindres)
Salindres was the first Axens plant to implement OIAnalytics, Optimistik's solution. The group's other plants now use it as well. Today, the production units are equipped with dashboards. They track the main energy consumption figures, productivity and quality data, all in one place. These dashboards help every level of the shop floor run its processes.
“It's a very valuable management tool, both for the supervisors who run our lines and for the operators on the ground.” (translated from French) — Maxime Montillet, Plant Manager
For the teams, the benefit is faster, more detailed process analysis.
The Salindres site also supports other entities and subsidiaries within the group. OIAnalytics gives access, on the same platform, to the plant's own data and to data from the group's other sites that make the same products. Teams can work remotely by sharing all of this data.
“We can compare ourselves, challenge each other and improve together.” (translated from French) — Maxime Montillet
Axens isn't stopping at dashboards. The company has built expertise in advanced data use, both among the site's process experts and among the data science specialists who support operations teams. They rely on OIAnalytics' advanced analytics tools and on deploying custom Python models. The goal: to go even further in service of performance.
Deploying OIAnalytics in Salindres delivered significant economic gains. For a site that exports 95% of its output, that is a direct competitiveness lever. Another key result: field teams adopted the tool across every function.
“Implementing Optimistik in Salindres has delivered substantial economic gains that strengthen our competitiveness in a global market. And we're very pleased with the high level of buy-in from our operations teams, whether in production, maintenance or logistics.” (translated from French) — Maxime Montillet
Axens turned scattered data into a shared tool for management and optimization, from operators to the plant manager and across sites. This common foundation now supports both economic performance and energy efficiency.
to see how OIAnalytics can unlock the value of your plant data
