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Better integration of data and more
powerful software enhance efforts
Better integration of data and more powerful
software enhance efforts
By Seán Ottewell, Editor at Large
CHEMICAL MANUFACTURERS are able to
collect a wealth of production data but effectively
using those data to improve reliability remains a
challenge for many firms. However, some operating
companies such as Salalah Methanol Company
(SMC), Honeywell Performance Materials &
Technologies (PMT) and BASF are making the most
of their data.
John Harrison, Toronto-based senior solution
specialist for software provider SAP, sums up the
general situation: “Our chemical customers told us
that they had been collecting operational information
for years and they believed that there was ‘gold’ in the
data, but they lacked the capability to quickly bring
multiple sources of data together and to transform the
data into actionable information.”
So two years ago, SAP teamed up with Rolta,
Alpharetta, Ga., to tackle this situation. Key to the
relationship is Rolta’s OneView software that is
designed to quickly transform operational data into
information, says Harrison.
A project carried out at SMC, Aquad, Oman,
provided an early success for the partnership. In
2013, SMC decided it wanted to improve operational
excellence, including reliability, by increasing
transparency and cross-functional visibility, and by
getting a unified enterprise view of its information
(Figure 1). It selected SAP Business Objects and
Rolta’s OneView.
The companies identified 107 overall key
performance indicators (KPIs). Of these,14 solely
focused on reliability and maintenance, e.g., covering
preventative maintenance compliance, preventative
maintenance overdue, planning effectiveness, backlog
of work orders, number of breakdowns, maintenance
budget compliance, inspection compliance variance,
and availability of reliability instruments.
SMC notes the immediate benefits of the
five-month project, which was completed in 2014,
included automating all business-critical reports,
standardizing KPI definitions, minimizing efforts
required for reporting, and achieving better
transparency and visibility of performance. It also has
reduced operational and process failures.
Over the longer term, the company hopes to
improve regulatory compliance and operational
excellence while maintaining a strategy of continuous
improvement across processes and procedures.
SMC says one of its key takeaways from the
project is how powerful its capabilities are now,
both in terms of compatibility with cutting-edge
developments such as the SAP HANA relational
database, and of support for the latest technologies
such as predictive analytics.
In addition, the strategy has helped SMC
break production records: in January the company
announced a new peak output of 5 million metric
tons/y of methanol.
The strategy an operating company uses for its
data depends upon where that company is in the
operational excellence cycle, notes Houston-based
Richard Martin, senior vice president of engineering
design and operations solutions for Rolta. “Some want
to start with high-level benchmarking KPIs that cross
the facility and enable executives to define metrics
that reinforce collaboration and drive enterprise
initiatives. Many clients have a specific business issue,
for example product development or quality, that they
need to address and use it as a quick success to provide
predicted benefits, which in turn funds the rollout
of a transformation initiative. Other companies are
very focused on product development or quality, for
example. So what is required varies on a case-by-case
basis — but as a whole the industry appreciates that
there is value here.”
To illustrate the point, St. Louis-based David
Dunn, vice president of business development for
Rolta, notes the techniques used at a plant making
bulk commodity chemicals — such as predictive
analysis and operational risk management — might
differ significantly from those needed at a batch
production site wanting to optimize a particular
product that only is manufactured a few times
a year. “Many areas can drive value, including:
composite risk identification and management;
quality and process improvements to identify and
even predict batch quality and create the optimal
batch, creating improved plant throughput; and
prescriptive maintenance and reliability to improve
asset reliability. Ultimately, there are many areas
specific to each plant situation where we can help
drive down the cost per pound out the plant door.”
However, pursuing better reliability as part of
improved operational excellence poses challenges. A
crucial one is the basic definition of the KPI being
used (Figure 2). “What is included and excluded
for the calculation? Does the production quantity
include scrap (waste product), or does it only include
first-pass product? If you can reuse the scrap to
produce good product, how is this quantity included
in the waste calculations? I’ve come across cases of
15 different people who work on the same plant all
using different KPI calculation methods because of this
lack of definition,” Harrison warns.
Martin concurs, describing the challenge faced by
one company wanting eight of its plants benchmarked
together. “You would think it should be easy to agree
common metrics here. Not so, and it was a very dynamic
OMAN PLANT
Figure 1. Salalah Methanol Company sought to increase reliability by getting a
unified enterprise view of its information. Source: SMC.
conversation. For example, each plant had its own
definition of first-pass quality yield. To help overcome
such problems we facilitate a process whereby everyone
agrees the definition of the metric in question. But it is a
very difficult cultural problem. Training is so important,
too, because real-time, online, not-editable-after-the-fact
information is somewhat more difficult to work with.”
Even getting the data in the first place can prove
problematic. For example, one chemical company told
Harrison that gaining agreement on product error
codes across all divisions and plants probably would
take longer than implementing the software project.
However, at another plant he was able to show
that simply automating the calculations for energy use
would save the salaries of three engineers who did these
calculations by hand.
Overall, Harrison believes the industry understands
that integrated decision-making brings benefits — and
that implementation is far less costly these days because
of off-the-shelf software products that are easy to use.
$1.2 BILLION IMPACT
The PMT Group of Honeywell, Morristown, N.J.,
which manufactures a diverse range of products
including specialty chemicals, films, nylon, catalysts
and fluorine products at 42 sites, began a maintenance
excellence program in 2005. By 2013, this had reduced
maintenance costs by 16% and raised overall equipment
effectiveness (OEE) to 82% from 70% across the
plants. This translates to over $1.2 billion of additional
operating income across the group over the period.
In 2006, the PMT Group’s senior leadership began to
fully integrate maintenance and reliability excellence into
the five-year planning cycle as a core strategic business
lever. Since 2007, the group has considered increases in
capital expenditures in growing markets only if the plants
have reached their peak sustainable OEE.
Initially, the PMT Group set out to assess the
most strategically leverageable sites, identifying the
plant events that compromise OEE performance,
and put together a five-year roadmap to boost OEE
performance. Today, these strategic sites collect daily
and monthly OEE gap data, which are accumulated
for justifying discrete projects focused on the various
issues that impact OEE. These include: operations and
maintenance work processes, equipment reliability,
process technology, and supply chain performance that
will yield measureable growth in OEE.
“Bottom line, driving OEE through improved
maintenance and reliability programs, including
predictive maintenance and a host of other analytics,
for the most-business-critical equipment is the key to
effective reliability results. Common sense, you say,
but creating the clear line of sight to these equipment
then installing the technical and management systems
to drive improvement accountabilities is the perplexing
part of achieving business-correlateable results,”
explains Richmond, Va.-based Stan Grabill, who
until recently was maintenance and reliability director
for the PMT Group and now is principal reliability
consultant for Honeywell Process Solutions.
“PMT learned huge lessons through deploying at a
highly-visible pilot site those ‘lean maintenance’ principles
of standardization of work processes and KPIs. We
learned that the cycle took 15–18 months to fully realize
the cultural transformation to a proactive partnership
between maintenance and operations,” he adds.
Work backlog shrank to a manageable 5–7 weeks
from 16+ weeks. Overtime dropped to less than 10%
from ~18% in most cases. Supplemental contract labor
was reduced. Predictive and preventative maintenance
increased to ~27% from ~12% of total maintenance
man-hours. Compliance with weekly scheduled
maintenance activities rose to ~79% from ~44% while
schedule loading of manpower to work planned jobs
rose to 81% from ~53%.
“While such predictive and preventative maintenance
techniques have been around for many years — 30 or
more — the nature of siloed work practices at PMT
resulted in not leveraging the equipment condition
information generated by reliability and maintenance
that they were giving us,” he says.
However, standardizing maintenance processes
and creating a proactive partnership between
maintenance, operations and reliability engineering
profoundly affected the effectiveness of reliability
programs. Today, reliability strategies are developed
and driven by two key objectives; process safety
management (mechanical integrity), and a focus on
equipment that impacts OEE performance.
PMT uses SAP-PM (plant maintenance) as its
computerized maintenance management system.
The group is looking to replace its home-grown
data collection system for OEE with Honeywell’s
Downtime Reporter. Meridium software manages both
inspection data and instrument calibration. Grabill
foresees migrating to real-time condition/performance
monitoring of the most critical equipment, probably via
Honeywell’s Asset Manager.
The aim is to raise OEE to 90%+, he says,
adding that the company still has much to learn in
applying the right improvement tools and conditionmonitoring technologies to effectively raise
performance for the future.
“Conditioned-based monitoring technologies, big
data, statistical intelligence and collaborative platforms
are evolving rapidly. Creating a company culture that
encourages the practitioners to link up with technology/
solution offerings will increase their competitiveness in
this global economy,” he emphasizes.
LEVERAGING UNUSED CAPACITY
BASF, Ludwigshafen, Germany, is putting increased
focus on asset reliability, partly in response to the need
to take advantage of unused capacity to support its
growth strategy. “Our improvement targets are well
defined and a global platform dedicated to reliability
optimization has been set up. This platform is based
on equipment-specific technical expertise and uses
internal consultants to support the implementation
of its various elements,” says Peder Lindbjerg Jensen,
senior maintenance consultant for engineering and
maintenance at the site.
CAREFUL ANALYSIS
Figure 2. Defining key performance indicators isn’t always straightforward. Source: SAP.
As part of this strategy, the company particularly is
concentrating on implementing and optimizing badactor-management programs to improve asset reliability
and effectiveness. Together with root cause analysis,
these programs are seen as absolutely central elements
to BASF’s reliability improvement efforts.
Alongside techniques such as loss analysis and
reporting, root cause analysis, failure mode and
effects analysis, spare parts management, KPIs and
benchmarking, and predictive analysis — all important
tools — the company is using its internal consultants
to help plant personnel understand and improve the
transparency of data in an ongoing review of existing
preventative-maintenance programs.
BASF currently uses internally developed software
to drive improvements but now is evaluating more
powerful commercial software as part of this review
process, Jensen admits.
One big success is the eight-year risk-basedmanagement (RBM) project at the Ludwigshafen site,
he notes. “This tool has clearly been a success story
for BASF and there are a number of examples where
risk-reducing measures have greatly supported our
operations, including reliability. However, we still
have a long way to go in the implementation of RBM
and the corresponding actions needed to meet the full
potential of this project,” he stresses.
Eprinted and posted with permission to SAP Global - SAP America Inc. from Chemical Processing
March © 2015 PUTMAN