Cordant™ Machine Health delivers prescriptive insights and 3.6x ROI in one year
With Cordant™ Machine Health, Solugen has moved from reactive to prescriptive maintenance and avoided more than 100 hours in downtime.
Company Profile
Solugen is a biotechnology company that utilizes cutting edge technology to create sustainable chemicals that replace those traditionally made using petroleum and natural gas.
Types of Machines Monitored
- Pumps
- Fans
- Blowers
- Compressors
- Gearboxes
Solution
Executive Summary
As a company in a machine intensive industry, Solugen understands the high cost of unplanned downtime and prioritizes its maintenance and reliability culture.
Solugen aimed to digitally transform maintenance and reliability and implement a standard solution to enable prescriptive maintenance and provide a deeper understanding of equipment health and performance. Baker Hughes was brought in to support this shift and in early 2023, supported the installation of Cordant™ Machine Health.
The solution was initially deployed across 15 machines and quickly proved its value with Solugen receiving its first actionable alert within 5 days and achieving ROI within 7.3 weeks. Solugen has since extended the deployment to 27 machines and plans to scale the solution into its next plant.
The Challenge: Balancing Maintenance Costs and Process Stability for a Startup
As a start-up, Solugen had variance in process stability due to unknown factors. Across eight days in the months preceding the machine health deployment, there was 400% variance in the company’s average hourly product rate The impacts were significant, and Solugen needed a standard maintenance approach that would set it up to produce and grow more efficiently.
The company sought a partner who understood its challenges and could help to drive deployment and adoption.
The Solution: Prescriptive diagnostics Underpinned by Purpose-Built AI
Solugen partnered with Baker Hughes’ Customer Success team to deploy machine health capabilities from Cordant™ Asset Health. The solution's simple architecture—consisting of a sensor, gateway, and cloud-based platform for monitoring and analytics—allowed for quick and scalable implementation.
Solugen further harnessed the Customer Success team’s deep domain expertise to optimize its maintenance strategies and process.
Cordant™ Machine Health uses purpose-built AI to analyze millions of condition monitoring sensor outputs 24/7 to identify patterns and detect any early signs of degradation. The solution also alerts Solugen’s team well in advance of failure, diagnosing root causes, and prescribing fixes.
Initially deployed to 15 machines, the solution has been extended to monitor 27. These include pumps, fans, blowers, compressors, and gearboxes.
Immediately following our installation of the Cordant™ Machine Health solution, it helped us avoid six hours of downtime and approximately $6,000 of repair costs on just one spherical pump. It was the start of what machine health is able to do for us as our AI partner in improving the health of our assets
Paul Neumann, Maintenance & Reliability Director, Solugen
The Result: Significant Savings and Improved Reliability
In the first two years of implementation, Cordant™ has helped Solugen avoid 122 hours of downtime and achieve over $111.3K in cost savings. These savings represent a 3.6x return on investment and include avoidance of costs associated with downtime, labor, parts, and waste.
“Machine Health has helped us delay hiring a full-time reliability & maintenance specialist—as a start-up this has been vital for us,” said Caitlin Molloy, VP of Manufacturing, Solugen.
Standout Machine Wins from 2023–2025
Cordant™ Machine Health enabled eight specific saves, alerting Solugen to pending faults and prescribing fixes.
Standout wins include:
Asset: Vacuum Pump (higher pump)
Problem solved: Flow Turbulence
One of the pumps monitored had a history of maintenance and operational failures that created costly repairs and disrupted the process flow. Alerts notified reliability personnel and prescribed recommended actions to identify and ascertain the root cause of the high vibration. The flow turbulence (fig 1) was corrected, which led to smoother operation of the unit for longer periods—increasing MTBR (Mean Time Between Repair). The early correction of the pump led to a total savings of $40,000 and 24 hours of downtime avoided.
Asset: Centrifugal pump
Alarm Machine Health Status
Immediately after baseline, one of the pumps showed signs of High Vane Pass in the pump impellers. This was identified as a resonance issue with the running speed of the pump on its current elevated base. Maintenance grouted the pump base to provide more stiffness to the pump RPM exciting forces. The costs of early identification within the installation phase reduced potential impeller wear and early machine failure and avoided 48 hours of downtime and a total savings of $4,500.
Asset: Vacuum Pump (lower pump)
Problem solved: Bearing Wear Corrected
A spare pump showed advanced signs of bearing wear. The decision was made to use the upper pump, allowing the lower pump to be used sparingly to prevent process and workflow disruptions. With each required run of the lower pump, the lubrication schedule would be updated, and the machine was monitored closely to ensure there would be no unexpected downtime. With proper planning and scheduling and operational modifications, the pump life was extended until it could be repaired during a scheduled outage which prevented costly unexpected maintenance and lost uptime. This led to a total savings of $40,000 and avoided 24 hours of downtime.
Asset: Compressor
Problem solved: Compressor Shutdown Avoided
Cordant™ Machine Health solution detected a fault and prescribed a simple fix of venting a relief pressure valve on the top head. If left unmonitored, this condition could have caused the diaphragm to blow out causing the compressor to lose pressure and prevented a sequence of events that would have stopped production in the plant. This avoidance alert meant Solugen saved $17,800 in total savings for this one event.
Scaling Success: New Plant to Adopt Cordant™ Machine Health Monitoring from the Start
Based on their success with Cordant™ Machine Health at their Houston startup facility, has embarked on the construction of a new plant. Recognizing the value and ROI from its deployment, it is collaborating with Baker Hughes’ Customer Success team plans to deploy Cordant™ Machine Health from the beginning. The simple architecture of the solution will support rapid deployment and time to value.
Solugen's Bioforge process achieved the Golden Month (Technology Readiness Level 8) in 2022 allowing Solugen to further decarbonize the chemicals industry.
- 3 million pounds in 1,000 hours
- >70 Tanker truckers in 42 days
- 94% average yield