Johnson Matthey Scales Commercial Scientific App Platform with Dash Enterprise

Introduction

Johnson Matthey plc is a sustainable technologies company headquartered in London, England. The company runs operations across more than 30 countries and owns 43 manufacturing sites around the world. Its 11k+ employees help customers drive down automotive emissions, transform energy systems, transition to net zero, and more.

Johnson Matthey organizes its operations into four business units: Platinum Group Metal Services, Clean Air, Catalyst Technologies, and Hydrogen Technologies. The advanced characterisation team at Johnson Matthey’s Technology Centre in Sonning aids research using advanced technology such as electron microscopy to gather and analyze large sets of data.

Challenge

The Johnson Matthey R&D data science team solves the challenge of bridging the gap between data generation and actionable insights. Given that the company uses advanced microscopy equipment that generates hundreds of gigabytes of detailed data, the real hurdle lies in advanced analysis.

Researchers require image analysis for tasks like particle sizing and object detection of catalyst materials. These processes involve applying data science algorithms and delivering tools in a context where users lack coding expertise. The challenge is to develop data apps that enable researchers to perform these advanced analyses without needing to learn to code.

The team explored multiple solutions before exploring the open source Plotly Dash. From there, they transitioned to Dash Enterprise after enjoying the speed with which they could develop and deploy scientific web apps.

Solution

To ease the challenge of helping researchers conduct advanced analyses, the Johnson Matthey data science team delivers tailored analysis through scientific data apps. They utilize Dash Enterprise along with multiple open-source software tools to handle intensive memory operations asynchronously, that result from scientific image processing. Additionally, specific high-performance apps are hosted on a special server that integrates tightly with the instrument’s local file system infrastructure.

With Dash and other libraries, they create data apps with user-friendly interfaces packaged as a website. The backend, handled via Azure, integrates all necessary components, ensuring seamless functionality. Scalability is achieved through an internal apps platform, where developed scientific apps are published and accessed internally by chemists and research scientists.

Although the volume of requests varies, the team works on about one or two niche requests per month, collaborating closely with scientists to understand their use cases and develop the required algorithms. This end-to-end process results in usable data apps that allow chemists to perform data analysis effectively without needing coding expertise.

Results

Developing a data apps platform allows chemists and research scientists at Johnson Matthey to quickly analyze data and outputs from advanced equipment. In turn, the company's customers benefit from faster recommendations, insights, and IP.

The data science team at Johnson Matthey was able to achieve the following tangible benefits from using Dash Enterprise to develop bespoke scientific data apps:

• The ability to run cutting-edge analyses on four years of legacy data in just a few months.
• A compelling way to add value for Johnson Matthey customers with interactive analytics and dashboards
• Reduced time taken for analyses from one day to a few minutes, saving the company the costs of an entire day per employee