Invensys Operations Management – Industry Solutions for Specialty and Fine Chemicals: Production Optimization…

“Improve plant economic performance by increasing production yields and agility by improving visualization,

reacting faster to supply chain issues and predicting problems or variations before they occur.”

Benefits

- Savings of up to 5% of product output value - Increased yields

- Less variability in Process performance - Improved workflow and collaboration

- Increased capacity and reduced waste - Reduced inventory / reduced safety stock levels

- Better, more immediate manufacturing intelligence - Improved agility and responsiveness to operational issues

Industry Challenges

The most common method used by specialty and fine chemical plants to manage workflow, collaboration and schedules is

manual. Typically on a monthly basis, the production planning department produces a production plan that is manually

passed onto operations in terms of what volumes of which products are expected over the month. Staff in operations then

manually “juggles” process equipment, material and supplies, production lines, and personnel availabilities to produce the

required volumes of those products by the end of the month. Because of changes in these operational availabilities, nearly

every day sees a new schedule to accommodate these changes – sometimes even more often than that.

During the actual production run, operations does not discover potential problems in advance and decisions are made too

late or inaccurately to improve production yields due to a lack of the ‘right information at the right time’. If problems are

not addressed early, the operator or engineer may not have time to analyze the root cause of the problem and try to

determine the best course of corrective action. Instead, decisions are usually made based upon “rules-of-thumb” or just

sheer expediency: whatever works (and is safe). Decisions ought to be based on data analysis, and need to be accurate so

that the right information is given to the right people at the right time. Because this needed information to the right people

is missing, decisions are usually made in the manufacturing or business process operations whose impact on profitability is

often not identified or known until the monthly accounting reports are published one to two weeks after the close of the

previous month, way too late to do anything meaningful about it. Thus, Operations, which creates the products and incurs

the costs, has no or little idea about the impacts of operational decisions on the profitability while they’re making those

decisions. They are literally flying blind to the impact on the business of their decisions and resulting actions.

Using a combination of automatic and manual processes, the

current approach to managing disparate data from disparate

sources, product variability and workflow losses costs the

specialty and fine chemical industries millions of dollars per

year in lost earnings either through reduced yield, increased

costs or lost revenue opportunities. This “Cost of Poor

Quality” – COPQ – can range as much as 30%-40% of the total

value of the goods produced in even the best plants in this

industry. The problem can be mitigated by improving agility

and workflow management with early identification and

correction of problems that cause product variability and loss

of yield. By optimizing the process, additional capacity and

yields can also be realized.

Invensys Operations Management – Industry Solutions for Specialty and Fine Chemicals: Production Optimization…

Invensys Specialty Chemical Industry Solution: Production Optimization

The Invensys Production Optimization Industry Solution for specialty and fine chemical is designed to improve yield, agility

and workflow management so that problems with scheduling, product demand, product variations, yields and maintenance

are identified early. In addition, root causes are analyzed and recommendations provided to empower plant personnel to

make faster, better business decisions, in the right time frames to enable them to implement corrective actions before any

problems or variations occur. In this way, product variability and product demand are managed better and month-end

surprises avoided. The right, context-full information gets to the right person at the right time. Product yields and

manufacturing capacity is greatly improved as well as reduction in waste and product variability. The key components of

the specialty/fine chemical InFusion industry solution are shown in the following diagram.

What this means to our clients in the Specialty and Fine Chemical Industries:

The Invensys specialty and fine chemical “Production Optimization” industry solution achieves improved batch chemical

yields through a combination of three principal approaches:

1. Improved batch execution and management: Many facilities are lacking in batch automation techniques to improve

control and lot-to-lot repeatability of their batches. Our batch solution as part of this InFusion solution embeds the

latest ISA S88-compliant batch automation package not only for the actual batch execution, but the supervisory

components as well to manage the batches and report on the production operations. Our experts will asses a site’s – or

an enterprise’s – current level of automation practice, and make a recommendation of what best-practices would

provide, define the gaps, and then define costs and benefits to close these gaps. While this component can exist by

itself and deliver substantial client-benefit, its real value comes in being part of the other two components of this

solution in delivering larger business value to our clients that goes beyond just batch control.

2. Improved access to meaningful business information associated with production operations: One of the largest

contributors to less-than-optimal yield in batch chemical plants is the inability to access the correct information on-time

in a meaningful way to make operational business decisions. This principally revolves around current production costs,

qualities, and schedules (volume delivered over what time frame) for production being performed right now. Managers

have access to that information from their ERP systems, but this arrives way too late for them to actually use to guide

the production operations while the product is being created and the costs incurred, sometimes weeks too late. Thus,

they may know what HAS HAPPENED, but NOT what IS HAPPENING. There is a world of difference. Our solution

Invensys Operations Management – Industry Solutions for Specialty and Fine Chemicals: Production Optimization…

addresses this shortcoming by providing real time access to their business variances (the difference between actuals

and forecasts) for these key business metrics.

We also allow immediate drill into the running process to determine the root cause of most variances so that corrective

action can be taken before these variances accrue into substantial losses. Thus, we inform those who can do something

meaningful about an issue: both WHAT a variance is and WHY. In addition, we’ve developed control algorithms to

actually “close the loop” on many of these business processes to actually allow businesses to run their operations in

“automatic”, not only based on the constraints of the process including safety, but based on the current business

drivers as well.

Last, because of our modelling capabilities, we can project past performance onto current conditions to actually predict

alternate operational pathways of higher profitability to add new meaning to “what if” by recommending operating

conditions of greater operating profitability. This aspect is achieved utilizing information scattered throughout

operations (DCSs/PLCs, LIMS, maintenance, ERP systems, and inventory management systems), unification of these pre-

existing systems to tie them into a single cohesive and unified system infrastructure and architecture so that the

needed data and information for this aspect of the solution is available without costly re-investments.

3. Closer-integration of the production operations with scheduling: Scheduling batch chemical operations is extremely

difficult due to the fundamental disconnect between the dynamics of the actual process operation and the static

nature of the planned schedule which aggregates production capacity and does not take into account “complex or

multi-path batch” production processes. These factors strain normally “fixed” schedules which become “out-dated”

almost from the outset resulting in a constant back-and-forth between operations (“where we actually are in

production”) and the scheduling department (“what we need to produce by when”) to continuously adjust the schedule

to reflect real conditions. Worse, most manual “schedules” – how much of which products should be made on which

lines over what time period to optimize profitability – are determined on the basis of “rules-of thumb” and “what

works” rather than using any sophisticated profit optimizer. These shortcomings are overcome with this industry

solution by powerful third party scheduling packages tailored for this industry such as WAM System’s Picaso™ or

Preactor™ to both optimize the production schedule to maximize profitability as well as dynamically tie operational

status information into the schedule. It is important to add that this approach follows the latest ISA S95 workflow

schema to make sure they are consistent with that Standard that spans this space.

These problems get worse if trying to optimize production for entire enterprises. Hence, the larger the “scope” of the

applied solution, the greater the potential for recognized economic impact to the company as there are more areas to

remedy and capture additional potential business value. Based on Invensys experience, we can improve an average

manufacturing plant’s – or enterprise’s – output by as much as 5% of the sales value of production.

Conclusion:

By accessing and integrating data from multiple disparate systems (i.e. LIMS, PLC’s, DCS’s, etc), our solutions easily

empower plant personnel with the ability to identify potential problems before they arise. Combining this better

understanding of the causes of reduced yield and/or quality, and by utilising optimised scheduling to improve

production plan / delivery adherence, benefits have been shown to be significant and measurable. Based on our

experience, an average of 1- 5% of the total output value per plant – or at the enterprise level – in reduced costs or

increased revenues can be realized using this approach.

Invensys Operations Management 5601 Granite Parkway II, Suite 1000 Plano, Texas 75024 U.S.A. +1.469.365.6400

www.iom.invensys.com

Invensys, the Invensys logo, ArchestrA, Avantis, Eurotherm, Foxboro, IMServ, InFusion, SimSci-Esscor, Skelta, Triconex, & Wonderware are trademarks of Invensys plc, its subsidiaries or affiliates. All other brands and product names may be the trademarks or service marks of their representative owners.

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