AI in Action: How QAFCO is transforming operational excellence

Executive Summary

Qatar Fertilizer Company (QAFCO), a pioneer in the Fertilizer industry since 1969, has launched a strategic transformation to become the world's leading urea producer. Central to this ambition is the deployment of an Operational Excellence Framework that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize production and improve reliability. 

Partnering with Baker Hughes, QAFCO has implemented Cordant™ and iCenter powered by Cordant™, services to support this framework and enable real-time process optimization and predictive maintenance across QAFCO's ammonia plants. 

Measurable results include a 0.8% increase in site-wide daily ammonia production and approximately 566 hours of production time saved in two years. These outcomes reflect the early success of QAFCO's AI transformation and set the stage for broader enterprise-wide implementation through 2027. A joint delegation from QAFCO and Baker Hughes presented this material at the GPCA Agri-Nutrients Conference, held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, from September 29 to October 1, 2025. 

The Problem

QAFCO faced several operational challenges that limited its ability to maximize production efficiency and asset performance.

QAFCO has proactively addressed operational challenges to unlock greater production efficiency and asset performance. By systematically analyzing production losses as a percentage of the plant’s Maximum Demonstrated Rate (MDR), the team identified opportunities to close the gap between actual and potential output. Maximizing production of ammonia involves complex trade-offs between front end and back end processes with multiple variables and constraints, making dynamic optimization challenging and difficult to achieve with advanced process control technologies alone.

Asset reliability was another concern. QAFCO has critical machines, including gas turbines, steam turbines and compressors. It lacked a unified system to monitor the health of these assets and predict failures. Maintenance was therefore largely reactive, leading to unplanned shutdowns and costly production interruptions.

To achieve operational excellence, QAFCO recognized the need to embed new ways of working and foster a more proactive and predictive mindset across the organization. Empowering employees and reinforcing change leadership and communication became central to this transformation. Implementing advanced technologies required not only technical integration but also strong engagement and capability building to drive adoption across teams. Aligning leaders, engineers, and operators around a shared vision, and strengthening the ability and commitment to work differently was essential to realizing sustainable value. 

Key challenges included:

• Production inefficiencies due to suboptimal optimization
• Unplanned downtime from reactive maintenance practices
• Fragmented asset data across multiple systems and plants
• Limited predictive capabilities for early failure detection
• Organizational complexity and varying levels of readiness to adopt change across diverse teams

The Solution

To address these challenges, QAFCO implemented multi-layered physics-based and AI algorithms within its new Operational Excellence Framework, enabled by a robust change management approach.

QAFCO and Baker Hughes structured the transformation around 3 key components: process optimization, reliability driven maintenance, and change management, which was embedded across all activities to ensure adoption and sustainment.

1. Process Optimization

QAFCO deployed Cordant™ Process Optimization, which leverages domain led machine learning models, on top of its Advanced Process Control systems to analyze real-time operational data. These models provided control recommendations that helped operators navigate complex trade-offs in the ammonia production process in order to increase ammonia production.

2. Reliability Driven Maintenance

To monitor asset health and predict failures, Baker Hughes introduced a hybrid diagnostic model combining physics based and AI algorithms. The solution included:

iCenter™, powered by Cordant™: Baker Hughes’ 24/7 remote monitoring service, covering critical assets including gas turbines, steam turbines, centrifugal compressors, electric motors, generators and gear boxes. The Doha iCenter™ delivers continuous equipment monitoring alongside the support of dedicated diagnostic engineers (DDE), who bring significant deep domain expertise, partnering with QAFCO to proactively identify risks to prevent costly disruptions, supporting reliability, availability and driving operational excellence.

Cordant™ Asset Health, built on System 1™: The centralized platform unifies vast, disparate data from machines and equipment into a streamlined workflow that delivers real-time insights, prioritizes actions, mitigates failures, and optimizes asset care costs for measurable ROI.

3. Change Management

Recognizing that successful transformation depends on people, not technology alone, QAFCO adopted Baker Hughes’s change management methodology to guide the change journey and enable new ways of working across teams.

Key change management activities included:

• Engaging senior leadership to establish strategic vision and reinforce visible sponsorship throughout the transformation.
• Evaluating change impacts and activating workstreams through targeted interventions, equipping teams with the knowledge and skills to ensure grassroots adoption.
• Embedding change through consistent communication and acknowledgement to sustain engagement and reinforce progress.

The Results

The transformation has already delivered tangible benefits across QAFCO’s operations.

Operational Impact:

1. +0.8% increase in site-wide daily ammonia production
2. ~566 hours of production saved since the go-live in November 2023

Example: 80 hours of production loss avoided through early detection of a CO2 HP Compressor anomaly

3. Formalized discussions around plant constraints, improvement initiatives and proactive alert handling
on asset condition & health.

Organizational Engagement:

7 Condition Monitoring Engineers, 9 Rotating Equipment Specialists across Mechanical, Electrical, Instrumentation & Automation were engaged for iCenter™.

Next Steps

QAFCO is now preparing to extend Cordant™ Process Optimization to its urea plants and implement Global Site-wide Process Optimization by 2027. The site-wide Process Optimization will allocate production targets for all ammonia & urea plants based on CO2 availability constraints and market-driven product pricing, optimizing energy and feedstock consumption, and realizing value across the enterprise through phased implementation.

QAFCO is further advancing its operations by introducing the following initiatives:

• Cordant™ Asset Strategy to develop, deploy and sustain effective Maintenance Strategies for all critical assets.
• Cordant™ Root Cause Analysis to perform root cause analysis investigations for production loss events and/or equipment downtimes coupled with action management to assign actions & solutions to multiple stakeholders across the enterprise.