It’s an exciting time at Ecolab. Digital technology is at the centre of transforming the way we do business. With the launch of the ECOLAB3D™ intelligence platform, along with the digital tools we are rolling out that harness its analytics power, we are entering a new era of enterprise performance and customer experience. We have a long history of partnering with our customers to help them achieve water and energy goals, maximise operational performance, solve problems, and ensure safety. ECOLAB3D enables us to take these valuable partnerships to the next level. Before we go too far in the future, let’s rewind the clock a bit…

ECOLAB3D started as a journey partnering with our customers to help them leverage data to discover new insights, recommend and take action, to deliver optimal value. Modern cloud computing platforms have inspired new capabilities in data analysis, enterprise performance, and real-time response. Armed with our new digital “superpower” we wanted to answer some fundamental questions: How could we harness the power of data to predict situations, provide actionable insights and rapidly solve customer problems? How could we provide new and additional value? How could we deliver solutions differently than we had for the last 100 years? How could we scale these solutions to work for millions of customers across industries?

Ecolab has been gathering data and employing IoT (Internet of Things) devices for more than 30 years. 3D TRASAR™ is a great example of how technology can give insight into a company’s operations and how those insights can lead to valuable solutions. It was a great start, but our ambition was to leverage our expertise on a much larger scale. We wanted to incorporate other new, cutting-edge technologies that are advancing daily. 

Once the power of the cloud enabled new capabilities to build on and accelerate our digital transformation journey, we began to show our true speed and agility using digital as a lever to enhance customer value. We built ECOLAB3D, a powerful data analytics platform on which we could build new digital ecosystems that make use of innovations around artificial intelligence, IoT and automation so that customers can assess their operation and then close the gap between their current performance and optimal performance. It ushers in a new day for our customers to achieve sustainability goals, saving more water and energy, better optimise efficiency, protect assets, drive financial improvement, and safely manage the health of their water systems.

The first collection of digital services that we have built on the ECOLAB3D platform are a direct response to the needs of our customers. In fact, they are the result of ideation and collaboration with our customers and our partners (particularly Microsoft). They are:

- Water Safety Intelligence
- OMNI™
- Water Quality Intelligence
- Water Flow Intelligence


These tools put our customers on the offense when it comes to saving water and energy, reducing corrosion and bacteria, troubleshooting equipment failures, monitoring financial performance and more. Companies are uncovering water-saving opportunities with real-time visibility of usage at multiple levels. They’re leveraging expedited water quality testing to identify risks faster and resolving corrosion issues within hours and days instead of weeks and months. With real-time financial monitoring, they’re prioritizing savings projects and reducing their total cost of operation. They’re leveraging built-in alerts, task recommendations, and communication tools to shorten response times, increase efficiency, boost uptime, and avoid production issues. 

As we move into the future with ECOLAB3D, its power will only grow. Ecolab has been working with companies across the power, chemicals, steel, energy, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, mining, paper, food, and beverage industries — and many more — for decades. Working with our partners, we are able to obtain anonymous metadata from these operations and feed that information into the platform. We can then leverage that insight to work for other customers. For example, if there’s a new way of optimizing operational performance in a power plant in South Korea, we can take those lessons learned and apply them in Texas. 

We also built ECOLAB3D to work with the technology of tomorrow. It’s a platform that can be adapted. We’re currently working with machine vision and image processing analytics to use photos and video to understand what’s happening in real time. We can rapidly build tools and solutions that work with technologies that meet our customers’ specific needs. 

ECOLAB3D isn’t innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s about creating value and never letting go of our relentless passion, drive and energy to propel customer organizations forward.