Cut Polyol Plant Commissioning Time by 50%
Full life-cycle automation for a new polyol facility in Chicago — 50% faster commissioning, schedule beaten, standards now reused across the client’s portfolio.
A major food and agricultural products company was building a new polyol facility outside Chicago. New process. New equipment. Tight coordination between plant staff, prime contractor, and construction. And a control system that — by the nature of the chemistry — could not be fully finalized until production was actually running.
The challenge
Most automation projects assume the process is fixed. This one was the opposite. The team needed flexibility to absorb construction surprises, but discipline to hit a schedule that was already aggressive.
What we did
TEC built standards instead of one-off solutions — and reused them everywhere they applied:
- Electrical panel design standards that scaled cleanly across hundreds of sensors and actuators.
- A control system structure with unique equipment-sequencing logic that contained risk from unknown equipment behavior.
- HMI screens with a single visual vocabulary — same symbols, same colors, same layouts across every operator station.
The outcome
- Met an aggressive startup schedule.
- Cut commissioning time by 50 percent.
- Reduced operator training time and maintenance troubleshooting time.
- The client now applies these standards to projects at other locations.
A standard does the work twice: once on the project that creates it, and again on every project that follows.
Key Results
50%
Faster Commissioning
Beat
Aggressive Startup Date
Adopted
As Client-Wide Standard
Technology Stack
Let's build something
that actually works.
Whether you need to modernize legacy controls, build out data infrastructure, or deploy ML models on the factory floor — we're ready when you are.
