Business opportunity

Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPChem) produces chemicals that are essential to the manufacturing of more than 70,000 consumer and industrial products.

Headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, the company has 31 sites worldwide, with many in the Houston area.

The CPChem leadership team has a vision to create a safer and more efficient work environment by improving employee communications and connectivity. Modernizing its infrastructure with next-generation digital networking is an essential first step to realizing its vision.

Technical challenge

Every day, worker communications across the multi-acre sites were hindered by poor Wi-Fi coverage due to the steel and concrete construction of plant facilities. To perform daily activities like work orders, permits or repairs, employees had to go inside to access Wi-Fi signals, walk long distances across the plant, or resort to using paper forms.

The CPChem team knew a private LTE/5G network could provide more secure, cost-effective high-bandwidth connectivity for employees to access mission-critical business applications, no matter where they were in the plant. But first, they needed a trusted partner to help set up the physical infrastructure, which included adding bandwidth, network slicing and more device connections, providing better Quality of Service (QoS) for voice communications, and improving security.

Our solution

Together, the CPChem operations team, Kyndryl, and its 5G networking partner created detailed design specifications and construction plans for eight Texas sites. After extensive testing at each site, Kyndryl deployed a secure, industrial-grade private LTE network using Citizen's Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum, covering both indoor and outdoor facilities.

Kyndryl will provide ongoing monitoring and management services to automate the identification and resolution of issues that could disrupt the network.

CPChem’s employees can now perform daily activities efficiently – communicating with colleagues via MS Teams, pulling up online manuals in the field to resolve repairs, or filling out work orders in SAP are quickly accessed using the new network.

What progress looks like

• Real-time collaboration between teams anywhere in the plant via any device, thanks to LTE connectivity and applications used by plant workers.
• Employee-gained efficiency with quick access to online mission-critical business applications.
• Data is available in the field where the work is taking place, creating a safer environment.

As Kyndryl and CPChem continue to expand the private wireless deployments globally, other technologies such as augmented applications, edge computing, Internet of Things, AIOps with Kyndryl Bridge, and worker safety will also be implemented and enabled to deliver even more value for employees and the business.