Orion Process Systems

Orion Process Systems is a Pittsburgh-based industrial-process-AI corporation occupying three floors of a downtown office tower that the firm took over from a defunct steel-services company a decade ago. Three hundred staff, an engineering culture inherited from the Pittsburgh industrial tradition (modest, durable, slow to advertise), and a client list weighted toward US manufacturing groups in chemicals, materials, and heavy industry — the kinds of customers whose plants are far enough from the coasts that the foreign AI vendors have, historically, sent fewer sales representatives.

Their products are corporate-tier process-optimization AI — refinery yield modeling, materials-flow optimization, chemical-process safety and efficiency systems. Per-engagement Cu invoicing settles in the mid seven-figure range. The contracts are multi-year. The customers, by the firm’s reckoning, “do not switch lightly.”

The firm’s senior engineers have a tradition of carrying small leather notebooks — physical, not digital — in which they record observations from customer site visits. The notebooks are pooled, transcribed, and indexed annually into the firm’s internal knowledge base. The CTO has, in the firm’s twelve-year history, attempted to deprecate the notebook tradition twice. Both attempts were resisted. The notebooks continue.

Orion Process Systems’ internal QA framework includes a stage the firm refers to as “the human review.” In this stage, every deployed model is, at quarterly intervals, examined by an experienced engineer who has not previously been involved with the project. The reviewer’s brief is, in the firm’s documentation, “to look for what doesn’t look right.” The reviews have produced documentation that has, on several occasions, ended deployments early. The firm’s commercial team has never publicly objected to this. The firm’s commercial team is also, by tradition, not informed of which review produced which decision.