If the affected containers are mistakenly shipped in this condition, customers could experience severe and sometimes even fatal consequences. And even if the contaminated inventory is identified before shipping, many problems can still arise. The chemical company would have to discard the unusable barrels, impacting inventory levels and its ability to fulfill orders—which in turn could affect quarterly revenues, increase production costs and, ultimately, cost it a great deal of money.

IBM® Business Partner SingleStore worked to solve a similar safety issue for one customer, a chemical research plant. Within this facility, containers held various chemicals that were under study and required maintenance within certain thresholds. For instance, the minimum temperature threshold for this specific plant’s inventory is 27°F and the maximum is 30°F. Such data needs to be tracked using IoT sensors attached to all the stored containers, but this plant experienced fluctuating temperatures within those containers.

“They needed a digital transformation to help them become more of a data-driven organization. We needed to help them detect these temperature anomalies,” says Mark Lochbihler, SingleStore’s Global Director of Technical Alliances. “If container temperatures are too low or too high, the consequences could be fatal. Hence, swift action must be taken when the container’s temperature crosses the defined threshold.”

Once implemented, the new solution will enable SingleStore and IBM clients to:

• Have better quality control within the plant’s storage facilities
  
  
• Increase revenue and reduce operational costs
  
  
• Improve inventory and on-time deliveries

“Chemical Storage Quality Control is the main problem, and we will solve it with this new IoT solution. The temperatures in our customer’s storage facilities will automatically adjust to the correct temperatures based on the new solution we are deploying with IBM,” says Lochbihler. “Our clients are then automatically alerted if storage temperatures are at an unsafe range.”

Along with the partnership, IBM sellers can include the SingleStore solution as a cloud-native, hybrid, real-time and historical data hub in solution proposals for customers. IBM teams can also incorporate and resell SingleStore as a modern data layer for data-intensive applications, jointly with IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

“IBM and SingleStore are already offering hybrid cloud solutions for the world’s most challenging digital transformation projects. We felt that partnering with IBM would be the natural thing to do as we built out this modern IoT solution for our customer,” Lochbihler says. “As we worked together, we learned that we have a tremendous value proposition for our joint customers. We are truly better together when it comes to enabling digital transformation and data-driven solutions at a customer site.”