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CASE STUDY

Photo: Courtesy of Vynova Group

Vynova Belgium Improves Engineering Productivity During Global PandemicPAS Remote Services enable secure, on-time project delivery despite site access restrictions

About the CompanyVynova, a chemical company with production sites in five countries throughout Europe, supplies chlor-alkali chemicals and PVC resins to manufacturing companies across a wide range of industries. Their products play a key role in the production of numerous industrial products and consumer goods.

ChallengeWhen faced with the sudden global COVID-19 pandemic, Vynova needed to ensure its core operations, including planned upgrades to key systems that help enable safe and reliable chemical production, continued without interruption.

Vynova Belgium has been using PAS Automation Integrity™ industrial control system configuration management capabilities as a core component of its OT asset management program for the last 13 years. Automation Integrity plays a key role in ensuring plant productivity and safety by helping plant automation engineers identify and eliminate configuration defects, avoid incidents, and prevent unplanned shutdowns.

Vynova Belgium planned to upgrade Automation Integrity to take advantage of recent solution enhancements. Under normal circumstances, a PAS professional services engineer would come on-site to perform the upgrade. However, due to the sudden site access restrictions implemented to protect employee, customer, and partner health and ensure operational continuity, all face-to-face meetings with customers and suppliers were cancelled and on-site visits prohibited.

SolutionPAS was committed to delivering the Automation Integrity upgrade as agreed and on time. PAS has also provided remote delivery services for many years to a wide variety of customers in over 70 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and South America when on-site access to a facility is not possible due to physical location, travel restrictions, physical security, or other reasons.

Business Benefits:On-time project delivery despite site access restrictions

Improved automation engineering productivity

Ability to provide safe, reliable operations enhanced

Health and safety of essential plant operations protected

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About PAS

PAS, the OT Integrity company, delivers software solutions that prevent, detect, & remediate cyber threats; reduce process safety risks and optimize profitability; and enable trusted data for decision-making. PAS helps industrial organizations Ensure OT Integrity including 13 of the top 15 refining, 13 of the top 15 chemical, 4 of the top 5 pulp and paper, 3 of the top 5 mining, and 7 of the top 20 power generation companies. For more information, visit www.pas.com.

After learning of the site access restrictions, the PAS professional services engineer responsible for the upgrade immediately contacted the Vynova Senior Automation Manager and proposed shifting from on-site to remote delivery so the upgrade could continue.

The highly experienced PAS professional services team and Vynova site automation engineers then worked together to ensure their remote upgrade plan met both Vynova corporate and site IT and OT cybersecurity policies and requirements. This included:

The Automation Integrity upgrade completed on time and in scope. The automation engineers at Vynova were delighted with both the remote upgrade process as well as the new Automation Integrity enhancements which improved productivity and enhanced their ability to deliver safe and reliability production to the business in uncertain times. According to the Senior Automation Manager in charge, PAS clearly demonstrated its ability to provide a premium level of engineering services whether remote or onsite.

• Written approval from Vynova for remote access

• Close collaboration with the Vynova IT and OT security teams to ensure properly controlled network access and credentials

• Customer-initiated secure file transfer

• Live collaboration and supervision using approved collaboration tools

© 2020 PAS Global, LLC. Ideas, solutions, hints, and procedures from this document are the intellectual property of PAS Global, LLC and thus protected by copyright. They may not be reproduced, transmitted to third parties or used in any form for commercial purposes without the express permission of PAS Global, LLC.

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