15 Years of Alpha Process Control: 200 Projects, 24 Countries, One Standard

The Numbers, and What They Mean

In fifteen years, Alpha Process Control has delivered more than 200 advanced process control projects across 24 countries. Oil refineries, petrochemical plants, gas processing units, LNG terminals — from Pisa to South Korea to Canada.

The milestone is worth marking. But the number that matters most to us is not 200. It is the clients who have been with us for five, eight, ten years, and who keep calling because the last controller still works. That is not a given in this industry. It is the result of a specific choice, made in Pisa in March 2011, and held to ever since.

Alpha was founded by four engineers — Filippo Trivella, Maurizio Rossi, Michela Montesi, and Alessandro Brambilla — who had deep roots in APC before the firm existed. Filippo had graduated cum laude from the University of Pisa and spent his earliest career immersed in process control. Between them, the founders had led hundreds of projects at the leading APC firms in Europe. They knew exactly what great APC looked like. And they believed a firm whose only business was APC — with no competing priorities, no line-item pressures — would do it better.

The founding commitment was simple: never hand over a controller you are not proud of. Do the plant test properly. Stay after commissioning. Be accountable for the result. The name Alpha Process Control was new on March 15, 2011. The standard behind it was not.

Fifteen Years. Two Hundred Projects. Twenty-Four Countries.

Since March 2011, Alpha has delivered more than 200 APC projects across oil refining, petrochemical production, and gas processing. Our work spans 24 countries — from crude distillation units in Greece and Lithuania to LNG terminals in Brunei, from polypropylene reactors in Saudi Arabia to hydrocracking units in Canada.

Our client list includes Shell, SABIC, GS Caltex, CEPSA, Motor Oil Hellas, PKN Orlen, SARAS, INA, Orlen Lietuva, Hellenic Petroleum, and many others. Many have been working with us across multiple sites and multiple years. We are ISO 9001 certified since 2017, and we implement on every major APC platform in the market.

What the Projects Have Taught Us

After 200+ projects, a few things are clear.

The quality of the plant test determines the quality of the controller. This is the most fundamental truth in APC, and the most frequently underestimated. No model tuning compensates for poor process identification. We invest heavily in this step — and it shows in the on-stream factors our clients report years after commissioning.

APC is a long-term asset. Controllers degrade as processes evolve, feedstocks change, and equipment is modified. The clients who realise the most sustained value are those who treat their APC applications as living systems — monitoring, maintaining, extending them. Many of our longest relationships began with one controller and have grown into decade-long multi-unit programmes.

People make projects work. The most successful APC implementations we have delivered have always involved genuine collaboration with the client's engineering and operations teams. The technology is a tool. Trust between people is what makes it deliver.

What Comes Next: ChatAPC

After 200 projects, something becomes clear. The controller is rarely the hardest part. The hardest part is the reasoning that surrounds it — the context that determines whether you push throughput today or hold back; whether the constraint you are hitting is real or an artefact of a fouling heat exchanger scheduled for maintenance in 72 hours; whether the shift team handing over at 6am understands why the margins were set the way they were.

That reasoning has always existed. It lives in emails, in shift notes, in the heads of senior engineers who have run the same unit for a decade. It is informal, fragile, and almost never captured in any system.

ChatAPC is Alpha's answer to that problem. It is an AI reasoning layer designed specifically for industrial process operations — refineries, petrochemical plants, gas processing units. It connects to a plant's existing data infrastructure and APC systems, formalises the context and decision logic that traditional controllers cannot hold, and makes trade-offs explicit and constraint margins visible across every shift. It does not replace the APC controller or the data platform. It sits above them, carrying the reasoning that experienced engineers apply every day — and preserving it.

ChatAPC is built on 15 years of APC project work and 30 years of process control heritage. It is not a generic AI tool applied to industrial data. It is the accumulated judgement of this team, codified so that a plant can operate with the benefit of that experience even when the senior engineer is not in the room.

We will be sharing more about ChatAPC in the coming weeks. If you would like to be among the first to see it, reach out directly.

Thank You

To our clients: thank you for 15 years of trust. Every difficult project has made us better engineers.

To the Alpha team: every controller still running in the field is a reflection of your work.

The next 15 years start today.