Speciality Chemicals

Optimising planning & scheduling

Ruben Gil, director of business consulting for the EMEA region at AspenTech looks at how speciality chemicals operators can achieve success by scheduling

The speciality chemicals sector has proved more robust than most process industries throughout the economic downturn. According to analyst organisation MarketLine's 'Europe: Chemicals Industry Guide', "the European speciality chemicals market generated total revenues of $204.7 billion in 2009, representing a compound annual growth rate of 8% for the period spanning 2005-2009".

Today, the recovery is gathering pace and growth prospects are looking positive. In a recent report, entitled 'Speciality Chemicals - A Global Market Overview', Global Information estimated that the global market for speciality chemicals would touch $483.7 billion in 2011 and $513 billion by 2012.

Barriers to success

Many issues do remain across the sector if growth is to be sustained. The speciality chemicals market is complex and highly demanding. The industry is characterised by the need to deliver innovative, high quality products quickly with ever shorter lead times. Added to this are challenges around escalating raw material costs, intense global competition driving prices down and conflicting production strategies (make-to-stock versus make-to-order). 

Companies also have to deal with a dynamic manufacturing environment where they need to optimise trade-offs between manufacturing costs, inventory levels and customer service while at the same time managing variable demand across a broad product portfolio. Most significantly, the industry has to tackle complex manufacturing processes involving tightly coupled multi-step batch processing with mixing and blending operations.

In the speciality chemicals sector, the key to addressing these challenges successfully is the ability to plan and schedule production processes optimally while also engaging with continuously shifting customer demands and operating constraints. The traditional approach used to plan and manage the production of a suite of products at geographically distributed production sites for geographically distributed customers, relies on a two-step process involving long-range (12 months) production planning across all assets and short term (one week to one month) local production scheduling.

The main objective of the production plan is to assign production quantities for each asset while taking into account asset capacities, recipe unit ratios, raw material and transportation costs and product prices. The goal of the production schedule is to determine the timing and the material produced by each batch run on a reactor, as well as cleaning tasks, while also taking into consideration inventory replenishment needs and inventory capacities. In an ideal scenario, the two elements should work together to deliver operational efficiencies and achieve optimisation across the speciality chemicals production process. 

Scheduling optimisation

Effective scheduling is fundamental to achieving success in this sector. Speciality chemicals scheduling systems can perform operational functions that are beyond those of any planning system.

Speciality chemicals manufacturers are facing increasing complexity challenges

As a result of sequence-dependent product changeover costs, the short-term product schedule for a given asset can impact on its capacity and, therefore, its long-range production plan. However, the plan does not directly account for changeover costs. Instead, it uses discounted capacities for each asset. Similarly, the plan does not take into account inventory constraints.

Scheduling decision software tools bring process industry manufacturers several key advantages over and above what a planning system could deliver. This includes the ability to schedule under current operational constraints, taking into account equipment, capacity and customer order deadline issues.

Equally, these systems deliver the ability to schedule to optimised technology constraints including minimal cleaning and set-up time. The best of these can provide greater efficiency through increased capacity to evaluate multiple alternatives and the ability to achieve faster, more detailed evaluation of more production scenarios.

The best scheduling tools also deliver increased flexibility, including the ability to react quickly to unplanned events. They should be able to save time allocated by management and the scheduling team for scheduling and shift the focus of the schedulers from creating schedules to improving the value of the schedules they produce.

Value delivery

The benefits speciality chemicals manufacturers could achieve from process industry software scheduling systems are clear. The scale and the urgency of this requirement depend on a range of other factors. One of these is complexity.  Highly complicated speciality chemicals plants, where there is less visibility into the workings of the plant, have a greater need for scheduling than plants with less complexity.

It is certainly true that most plants with large numbers of products and operational constraints would benefit from a plant scheduling system. It is also true that the more dynamic the manufacturing environment, the more urgent the need for effective scheduling systems. As one customer commented recently to AspenTech, "the ability to react is what keeps us in the game."

In the most fluid, fast-changing environments, typical in the speciality chemicals sector, operators need to be agile enough to react quickly to disruptions or operational upsets. In the most dynamic scenarios, they will require on-time order fulfilment which also allows them to keep inventory at acceptable levels and they often need to be able to analyse complex trade-offs to minimise the impact on the schedule. At the same time, in dynamic environments operators will frequently need to synchronise schedule updates with the ERP system and obtain rapid visibility into the schedule and the real-time performance of the plant.

The third issue driving urgent implementation of scheduling systems is ease-of-use. Companies with fewer resources or a more inexperienced user base will typically require easy-to-use scheduling tools with intuitive user interfaces to help bridge the skills gap. Commenting on scheduling systems, one AspenTech customer recently said "the user interface is the single, most important piece of the overall system".

Gil - Process scheduling software offers benefits

Finding an answer

So, how can speciality chemicals manufacturers choose scheduling systems that best address these drivers? To tackle complexity, they need systems that model complex processes with enough fidelity to accurately evaluate alternatives. They must also be able to time multi-stage operations that simultaneously consider all manufacturing constraints and provide optimal sequencing of set-ups and transitions to minimise off-spec production and enhance asset utilisation.    

To support a dynamic manufacturing environment effectively, users should look for process industry software that gives their business both responsiveness and the agility required to satisfy increasingly demanding customers. These tools provide what-if analysis to simulate and understand the impact of schedule changes and supply forward visibility of inventory positions. 

In addition, to provide the requisite ease-of use, manufacturers should be looking for systems that deliver automation of the data gathering task to allow schedulers to focus on analysis rather than data management, standard interfaces and workflows and scalability of standard scheduling systems to fit simple or complex plants.  

One system that addresses all these issues and is already widely deployed across the speciality chemicals sector is Aspen Plant Scheduler, a three-tiered family of plant scheduling products. These software tools help manufacturers realise significant benefits in the areas of increased throughput, reduced inventory and expediting costs, as well as improving customer service.

Other benefits provided by the tools include basic finite capacity production scheduling with rapid implementation. Schedulers are able to effectively simulate production capacity and evaluate production scenarios for meeting total demand. Additionally, the ability to link multi-stage production activities and customer orders delivers real-time visibility of demand and manufacturing levels.

Conclusion

The health of the speciality chemicals sector is vital to the health of the chemicals sector generally. Speciality chemicals have the potential to deliver rapid product upgrading and high added value in the sector, as well as all areas of the national economy.

Yet, if the potential within the sector is to be fulfilled, manufacturers will need to deploy efficient scheduling across their operations to address their most urgent challenges. The fast changing environment, high demand and the need for greater operational visibility are just a few points of concern.

Process industry software systems are now available and delivering good return on investment for speciality chemicals companies today. Addressing such complexity is essential to achieve commercial success. These tools will help to achieve best practices, optimise the scheduling process and enable manufacturers to see significant value across the asset lifecycle, thus enabling them to gain a competitive advantage.

 

 

From Online Issue: December 2011