Refined touch

zoom

In order to achieve operational excellence, each level has to work with each other to form a synergy. (Getty Images)

Tathagata Basu – regional business development manager at Honeywell Middle East, examines operational excellence in refining and petrochemical applications.

Today’s refining and petrochemical industries are faced with numerous challenges such as higher energy prices, more compliance requirements and supply chain complexities. This situation requires a concerted and focused approach to achieve operational excellence.

Operational excellence is a holistic approach that focuses on delivering performance and benefits resulting from improved workflow and best practices across the entire manufacturing environment - addressing all the aspects of people effectiveness, asset effectiveness, process effectiveness, and business agility.

The entire operation in business can be divided into four levels: process level (process focus), operational level (operational focus), tactical level (business focus) and strategic level (enterprise focus).

Everything in a business exists within these levels. In order to achieve operational excellence, each level has to work with each other to form a synergy.

All manufacturing businesses require access to data to support even the most basic controls, workflows, performance assessment and business decisions. Top quartile companies develop an integrated architecture to gather, process, and serve data and information across the organisation for applications, work processes and visualisation. Where data and information is shared across functions and work processes, the data and supporting calculations must be part of the common infrastructure and is not specific to individual business functions. An important part of the data infrastructure is the set of limits and boundaries that set the operating envelope of the business, process, and equipments that are critical to a manufacturing enterprise.

The planning function typically takes place at the business or strategic level for decisions that have long term impacts and are well into the future. Planning functions look at medium to long term ways to maximise business performance by using market forecast information to match process capability and available feedstocks. A representative long term planning activity would be to develop an economic feasibility model to define a manufacturing process modification and enhancement. It is important that the planning results are reconciled against current market demand and that outputs are properly integrated with scheduling functions.

Whilst planning is an important activity, as most refining and petrochemical business planners will state, scheduling the plans into finite schedules with smaller time buckets is extremely critical to the operations of a large manufacturing complex. The scheduling function should take the consolidated planning results and create a set of feasible operating modes and moves to achieve as close as possible to the plan while remaining within the constraints of inventory, quality and process capability.

A good schedule should be able to take into account switching rules, feed receipts, product shipments, movements, etc. The scheduling activity is undertaken at the tactical level and has medium term impacts to the business in the near future. The output from scheduling is a series of multi-period, multi-mode, operating activities generally built around the major process areas and major storage and blending areas of a refinery and petrochemical facility.

Print | Email | Discuss this article

| Share |

READERS' COMMENTS

Click here to post a comment

Add your Comment All posts are sent to the administrator for review and are published only after approval. ArabianBusiness.com reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Arabian Business would like to point out that only comments relevant to the story will be published. Any containing personal insults or inappropriate language will not be approved.
Name *
Remember me on this computer
Email *	(Your email address will not be published)
City
Country
Subject *
Comment *
Notify me of further comments
Enter the words above *
Please click post only once - your comment will not be published immediately.

MORE FROM ARABIANBUSINESS.COM