The missing technology piece of a ‘big puzzle’: chemistry by Chemours, acceleration by LoadSpring

At The Chemours Company, a global leader in innovative technologies, chemistry brings meaningful change—and it takes guts to drive change. 

Chemours specializes in titanium technologies, thermal solutions, and advanced performance materials. Since 2015, Chemours has aligned itself with four strategic mission pillars: innovative, sustainable solutions; environmental leadership; community impact; and a positive, meaningful workplace for all its employees. With CEO Mark E. Newman at the helm, Chemours is uniquely positioned to deliver sustainable energy technology through solutions like Opteon™, Ti-Pure™, and Nafion™. 

In 2022, Chemours made significant inroads into sustainable, clean energy solutions via a $200 million investment in titanium membrane and dispersion technology with Nafion. By instituting the best clean energy and capital planning practices, Chemours stakes a claim in the new ‘Hydrogen Economy.’ Chemours’ most recent capital planning projects expand on their current technological capabilities by addressing the growing global demand for hydrogen solutions. 

Challenges

Chemours needed to transition each planned work site immediately. Coordinator Kristen Gropp described the project scheduling situation as a tremendous timing difficulty in search of a quick solution. 

Initially operating on-premise at the home base, Chemours teams utilized Oracle Primavera P6 for their project management. They needed to switch their platform from on-prem to the cloud – and pronto—requiring significant flexibility to facilitate a seamless transition. On top of the ongoing time crunch, Chemours underwent a massive P6 database failure. The maintenance costs were projected to be sky-high. 

Kristen needed to convince Chemours project leadership to switch to industry-standard technology by the required turnaround time to meet scheduling goals— creating a challenging time crunch. 

“In the middle of these efforts, we’d have mass failures of our database in high-impact periods during turnarounds,” Kristen said. “Our North American sites typically have manufacturing facility outages during the fall months where the P6 database is relied on heavily, so our goal was to transition each site before they were scheduled to start. It was a big puzzle.” 

Why LoadSpring

Chemours was initially referred to LoadSpring by a consulting company as they sought out expertise in scheduling best practices. 

“We were working with a consulting company based out of Houston. At the time, we were using Oracle directly for our hosting services and Primavera P6,” Kristen explained. “However, we were having a terrible time with the P6 customer support response whenever we would have issues.”

“So, we asked the consulting company helping us set up our database, ‘If you were in our shoes, who would you use for your hosting? Who have you had success with?’ They had used a lot of different hosting environments, but they recommended LoadSpring.” 

After completing the contracting process, Kristen said LoadSpring’s Cloud Solutions team was very approachable and enabled a straightforward rollout. LoadSpring worked with Chemours to determine the timing of each site. A staggered rollout made the transition to the cloud as seamless as possible. Ultimately, all application users could continue working with only a single afternoon of downtime. 

Because the Cloud Solutions team was so easy to work with, LoadSpring customer support was able to help Chemours quickly alleviate common rollout concerns and pain points:

• Chemours reduced help desk tickets by 80% after rolling out LoadSpring Cloud Platform (LCP)

• LoadSpring streamlined master schedule (SPI) reporting through role-based participation from the enterprise network (owner, contractors, subs, etc.) 

• LoadSpring maximized user adoption through access-anywhere schedule status & reporting

• Oracle P6 was deployed 400% faster than traditional application rollouts

• LoadSpring customer service is 96x faster than typical onsite application support

Solutions

Kristen met with the LoadSpring Cloud Solutions team, who had created a detailed training plan for the Chemours admin team. Chemours promptly built on it for their users. 

Kristen hosted one user training session, then handled other questions case by case. As expected, the rollout process had some learning curves, but weekly health checks alleviated data or performance lag time. 

“Eventually, we decided to split the servers for our login portals because many people were getting hung up on their logins,” Kristen explained. “At first, our users would log in about the same time every day, and it would overload the server.” 

Despite initial user questions, Kristen described LoadSpring as both committed and success driven: “We got a human response rather than being put in a queue and handed off 20 times. It was a seamless rollout process, and our uptime has improved significantly.” 

Chemours’ seamless transition of P6 from an on-prem to a hybrid cloud can be attributed to LoadSpring’s commitment to driving their customers’ cloud transformation, facilitating an easy rollout process from start to finish. Minimal downtime during project scheduling is critical to successful capital planning process best practices. Because of LoadSpring’s experience with the rollout process, the Cloud Solutions team knows that the less steep the learning curve, the easier the user adoption and rollout process. 

“Rollout was more feasible during that high-stress period with LoadSpring than someone else because I don’t think we would have gotten the same level of support,” Kristen said. “The response from the team was excellent.” 

Chemours’ continued conversion from on-prem to the cloud will be even more accessible from here on out: preparing them for more comprehensive, easier facilitation of the entire digital transformation process. 

“We’ve only had this going for about a year, so many of our projects are still in the early planning phases. I know that turnarounds don’t have a jazzy name or anything,” Kristen concluded, “But that is the most considerable maintenance spend for a company every year.” 

Ultimately, LoadSpring saved Chemours a significant amount of time and money.

Future Possibilities

As Chemours continues utilizing P6 via LoadSpring Cloud Platform, they will look for ways to integrate other automation and business intelligence applications into project controls. Throughout the cloud transformation process, one critical component is interoperability. Because the ability to seamlessly incorporate P6 into workflows with other applications is vital, LoadSpring Cloud Platform’s transformative interoperability holds the key to automation, machine learning, and other tenants of the new digital transformation economy. 

“I think automation is our keyword right now,” Kristen says, “A hot word in our company. We’ve got a lot of expansion projects on our capital side. Now that we’ve gone through a year of testing with this database, we have full expectation that our contractors will use our system, and we can utilize LoadSpring Cloud Platform as we continue to expand our assets.” 

LoadSpring will continue working with Kristen and the rest of the Chemours team to integrate P6 more fully with other project controls apps—eventually taking their hybrid cloud to a whole new level. Chemours can now build on the foundation already started once they are ready to further utilize LoadSpring Cloud Platform for its business intelligence integration capabilities. 

Turnarounds may be only one piece of a giant puzzle, but they keep the clock ticking— from scheduling to integration, automation, and beyond. That’s Chemours powered by LoadSpring: a partnership ready for digital transformation and the future of business—whatever it may bring. Contact us to learn how LoadSpring can help power your team toward bold future endeavors. 

About Chemours

The Chemours Company (NYSE: CC) is a global leader in titanium technologies, thermal & specialized solutions, and advanced performance materials, providing customers with a wide range of industry and market-defining products, application expertise, and chemistry-based innovations. Chemours delivers customized solutions to industrial and specialty chemicals product markets like coatings, plastics, air-conditioning, refrigeration, transportation, semiconductors, consumer electronics, industrial, oil, and gas. Flagship brands include Ti-Pure™, Opteon™, Freon™, Teflon™, Viton™, Nafion™, and Krytox™. With approximately 6,400 employees, 29 manufacturing sites, and 3,200 customers throughout 120 countries, Chemours is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware.

About LoadSpring

LoadSpring Solutions is the market leader in providing specialized cloud solutions for engineering and project control applications across the project or program lifecycle. LoadSpring’s application, security, and cloud infrastructure experts mitigate project delivery risks and improve capital project margins by providing secure access, support, performance monitoring, and interoperability across software ecosystems, as well as an integrated data capability to clean and present critical application data for reporting and predictive analytics —all delivered via LoadSpring Cloud Platform.