April 15, 2026

Industrial intelligence is becoming a priority for manufacturing

Across chemicals, energy, and broader process industries, the challenge is starting to look the same: operations are increasingly complex, data is everywhere, and decisions still take too long.

This is not because operators lack data. In fact, manufacturing is the most data-prolific industry there is.

The manufacturing industry generates 1.9 petabytes of data every year (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes – the equivalent of 500 billion pages of standard printed text!).

The problem? Data is not connected, contextualised or trusted in the moment it’s needed. That gap – the one between data and decisions – is today one of the biggest constraints on performance.

We see this reflected at Hannover Messe this year, where conversations are shifting from digitalisation as a set of tools toward focusing on something more fundamental.

Meet us at Hannover Messe

If you are joining Hannover Messe, we will be at the Microsoft booth, Hall 17, Stand G06, together with Yara International. We would love to continue the conversation and talk about how industrial intelligence is being applied in practice across heavy-asset industries.

How can you create real-time, shared understandings of your operation across teams, systems and time horisons?

Building a digital twin for Yara International

Together with Yara International, who operate major fertiliser and industrial chemical facilities around the world, we have been working on this challenge by building a unified, real-time workspace that connects engineering knowledge, operational data, and workflows in a single environment.

For Yara’s largest Porsgrunn site, this means bringing together decades of plant data – from 3D models and engineering documentation to maintenance history and live operational signals – into one contextualised view that teams can actually use.

A place where operators, engineers and maintenance teams can align faster, act earlier, and make decisions with confidence.

As our CEO Shane McArdle puts it:

“The real value of industrial intelligence is creating a reliable shared understanding of incredibly complex systems, so organisations can act with greater consistency, speed and foresight.”

 

Kongsberg Digital and Yara International:
An award-worthy partnership

The approach of combining platform thinking with deep operational context is what sits behind the work with Yara, and it’s also why the collaboration has been recognised at this year’s event.

Kongsberg Digital and Yara International have been awarded the Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award to be formally handed over during Hannover Messe, recognising how industrial intelligence can improve the way large-scale facilities access, interpret and act on data across their operations.


From Yara’s perspective, the impact is straightforward:

Our teams depend on having the right data at the right time to keep the plant operating safely, reliably and efficiently. This approach gives us exactly that – in context.
- Roar Nilsen, Program Manager, Digital Engineering, Yara International


Industrial transformation that focuses on creating coherence across what already exists – your people, systems, and workflows – is what enables better performance across the entire value chain.

Author
  • Kongsberg Digital

    Kongsberg Digital

    Kongsberg Digital is a provider of next-generation software and digital solutions to customers within oil and gas, chemicals and offshore wind. Its Industrial Work Surface, powered by the Kognitwin® platform, is redefining how industries work with data, insight and decision-making.

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