Knowledge Center: Plant Intelligence
Holistic Operational Excellence in Refining and Petrochemical Industries
Refining and Petrochemical Industries are today faced with numerous challenges including higher energy prices, more compliance requirements, and increasing supply chain complexities (see Figure 1) - all compounded by a shrinking workforce that needs to respond faster to handle more complex processes.This situation needs a concerted and focused approach to achieve Operational Excellence.
Figure 1 – More Issues, Less PeopleIt is critical to take a holistic approach to Operational Excellence, focussing on delivering performance and benefits resulting from improved workflow and best practices across the entire manufacturing environment - addressing all the aspects of people, asset effectiveness, process effectiveness, as well as business agility.
The Concepts of Operational ExcellenceA complete vision for Operational Excellence includes the basic automation layers (DCS, Historian) as well as Advanced Process Control (APC), asset management (AM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (‘traditional’ MES). Historically, these disciplines are treated independently, but world-class enterprises realise that all of these are really interconnected and require an integrated approach. Modern Manufacturing Excellence Solutions (the ‘new’ MES) extend well beyond the traditional boundaries of the solution space, and are oriented towards achieving holistic operational excellence.
When addressed together, they provide the infrastructure to • Improve business agility continuously through the swift alignment of manufacturing with changing business objectives and strategies; • Decrease costs by increasing production rates, lowering specific energy and raw material costs, streamlining supply and distribution, optimising product specifications, and reducing specific waste and emissions; • Enable product and process innovation through new products, new specifications and different product mixes; • Improve quality thanks to predictability and consistency.
Operational Excellence comes from a better understanding of the increasing complexity of manufacturing processes and from understanding and managing the value chain that it is part of. Increasing market pressures, regulation, and accountability force enterprises to do things right the first time, while maintaining a safe and secure environment for its employees and surroundings. This can only be achieved through holistic operational excellence solutions that create an environment where each employee performs his or her tasks perfectly, making good decisions based on timely and accurate information, avoiding incidents and human error and working in collaboration with others, all the while improving these activities continuously.
Figure 2 (below) represents the entire operating space of a manufacturing business.
The y-axis represents levels or hierarchies in a manufacturing business. It starts from the shop-floor level (process focus) and moves to the strategic level (enterprise focus) through the operational level (operations focus) and tactical level (business focus).
The x-axis represents decision-making and review timeframes. The middle of the x-axis signifies the current time (‘now’). To the right, it shows time in the future and to the left it shows time in the past.
Everything in a manufacturing business exists in this space - including equipment, people, functional groups, data, information, and the work processes that link them. This also represents the same space in which holistic operation excellence play a critical role in improving our customer’s business results.
Figure 2 – The Manufacturing Space The fundamental starting point for Operational Excellence is a Safe and Secure Environment, as shown below in Figure 3. This includes physical safety (such as access control, visitor management, localisation of people and assets, closed-circuit television, or digital video applications), but also includes the often overlooked cyber security.
Figure 3 – Safety & Security are Fundamental to Operational Excellence The next fundamental layer is Common Data and Visualisation, as shown below in Figure 4.
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.
The common data infrastructure provides validation, integration, and consistency (‘one version of the truth’). The architecture of the data infrastructure should also protect critical sub-systems (like the process control network) from higher level access.
Figure 4 – Common Data & Visualisation are Fundamental to Operational Excellence
A third fundamental pillar is a set of Common Limits and Boundaries (shown in figure 5) that set the operating envelope of the business, process, and equipments that are critical to a manufacturing enterprise.
At the business level, market share, distribution networks, pricing, and similar factors represent the envelope in which decisions must be made.
At the operations level, critical pressures, temperatures, constraints, environmental limits, safety limits, etc. represent the operating envelope in which the process may be safely and efficiently operated.
Where multiple limits apply to specific functions or operating mode or equipment, the limits should be ‘nested’ to ensure that no lower-level limit can be set above another limit in the hierarchy (for instance, an alarm limit cannot be set higher than the design limit).
Limits and boundaries should be stored in a common structure with rigorous change management processes and accountabilities fixed. Some limit sets (alarm limits for example) should be enforced routinely to avoid ‘creeping’ from acceptable positions.
Figure 5 – Common Limits & Boundaries are Fundamental to Operational Excellence
Based on these three fundamental layers, the manufacturing processes are executed. The following figures show these processes and how they should be integrated.
Figure 6 shows the Strategic Planning. This Supply Chain Management function takes place at the business or strategic level for decisions that have longer 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. A representative medium-term planning activity would be a processing plan for specific feeds on specific units running under specific operating conditions to meet available to promise (ATP) targets.
Figure 6 – Strategic Supply Chain Planning is the Top Process of Operational Excellence
The output of the Strategic Planning process is the input for the Operational Planning process, shown in Figure 7.
The refining and petrochemical businesses have been using multi-period model-based planning systems for decades. However, it is important that the models are kept up-to-date with current unit configurations, process constraints and available feeds. It is also 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 takes the consolidated planning results and creates 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.
First quartile refinery and petrochemical businesses require optimised schedules based on business requirements so as to maximise responsiveness to new market opportunities, to minimise inventory, to minimise risk to specific contracts and shipments, etc. This is important since a simulation based schedule may not always be the optimised schedule. It takes away a lot of the subjectivity from this critical activity.
Figure 7 – Operational Planning & Scheduling Process
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.
Operations Management includes the tools to communicate the schedule to operations groups as a series of instructions by process and operating area. For example, off-sites will receive a schedule of blending campaign and movements instructions; process areas receive operating modes, throughput targets, expected yields, quality estimates, target tankage, instructions for switching times, and targets operating conditions (cracking temperature range, maximise cut width, maximise throughput, etc.).
Operating instructions should contain all relevant targets and limits for the scheduled operations. These should be validated against the boundary database (remember: Common Limits & Boundaries), and should automatically update the targets in the control room at the point that they are implemented. This process is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8 – Operations Management Helps Communicating the Schedule
Operating instructions contain information and directions for changing operating modes, operating conditions, line-ups, etc. Changing conditions and equipment services introduces the potential for process upsets, disturbances, hazards, and costly excursions outside of normal operating boundaries. Procedure Execution describes solutions that minimise these risks by identifying and delivering consistent best practices for all modes of operation.
In its simplest form, procedural execution (shown in Figure 9, below) ensures operations have the appropriate up-to-date documentation and procedures available at the point of change execution. More sophisticated solutions use rigorous automated and/or remote handheld device workflow applications to ensure consistent and safe procedural execution.
Figure 9 – Procedural Execution Helps Avoiding Mistakes and Misunderstandings
As shown in Figure 10, in a modern refinery or petrochemical facility most procedures are finally executed through some form of digital distributed Control System.
At this level, the business is control focused and needs to take decisions that have a very high impact on the immediate term. Control systems are the interface between the softer side of business consisting of policies, plans and decisions and the hardware and equipment which finally transform these decisions to profits.
A modern open distributed control system platform is key to managing process and business information and workflow at the control room and engineering levels. The process control system is unique as it operates practically in real time; gathering and processing data, controlling process conditions, executing commands and is the point where perhaps the highest volume of data is processed with the highest frequency in the business cycle. Problems in the control system layer can have large consequences for the business, either through single high impact events or through a long sequence of relatively small ‘offsets’.
Figure 10 – The Process Control Layer
It is critical that operators and engineers can effectively manage the complex relationship between business requirements and process/equipment performance. This complexity has increased significantly over recent years as specifications and regulations have become more stringent and business performance is managed more directly.
At the same time operator skills and experience have been reduced as the workforce ages and fewer people are trained and employed in plants with increasing levels automation. Operator Effectiveness tools (shown in Figure 11) are a critical part of reducing the mundane tasks that operators and engineers need to perform - freeing them up to manage business performance and to optimise process conditions and equipment health.
Available tools include: - Advanced process control and optimisation to manage complex set point manipulation for maximum process performance and stability that drive processes against constraints and maximise business value;
- Electronic logbooks that eliminate manual handling of process data from screen to paper, automatically transfer events, alarm summaries, task lists, and operating instructions between shifts and across functions;
-Movements automation that creates, controls, monitors, and reports material movements across site; Alarm management and effective operator HMI’s (Human-Machine Interfaces) to reduce reaction times and to avoid misinterpretation of process conditions and identify required actions;
-Operator training simulators (OTS) to train operators to operate the process both in and outside safe boundaries, to fine tune their responses, to execute procedures, and to enhance their skills to minimise/eliminate human error caused upsets and problems.
Figure 11 – Operator Effectiveness Tools as the Key to Operational Excellence
In the imperfect world that we live in, plans and instructions rarely translate into exact execution. Even if they do, best practice in any function of a business will require capturing the actual data against the planned targets to have good functional performance management at all levels in the organisation.
As we move away from the real time environment into ‘history’, the first priority is to understand how well our process and equipment is performing – Asset Effectiveness. Please see Figure 12, below.
Diagnostics tools give operators direct feedback about the current state of the process and equipment assets e.g. heat exchanger fouling, emissions, compressor efficiency, column flooding, valve stiction, catalyst activity, etc.
Monitoring of process control loop performance tells us when and where to tune and focus maintenance activities, tightening up control and improving responsiveness, quality, and constraint compliance.
Measuring corrosion gives short and long term guidance for both operational and maintenance groups to improve performance and extend the life of plant assets.
Monitoring equipment health using information from field equipment, vibration monitors, sensors, and inferential process measurements gives operators, maintenance, and engineering functions actionable information about the health and life-expectancy of equipment, catalyst, and the overall process.
All this information develops over time to feed back into planning about the impact of decisions on plant state and health so that these can be factored into future decisions (e.g. new boundary conditions) where they critically impact business performance.
Maintenance groups can also use this information to develop reliability-centred maintenance strategies that optimise maintenance efforts, identify faulty equipment, and help them design better long-term protection strategies.
Figure 12 – Asset Effectiveness is a Broad Topic Enabled by Historical Data Capture
As we move further into history, it is important to measure how effectively procedures have been executed (shown in Figure 13) and to ensure product quality is consistent, process integrity has not been compromised, energy consumption and emissions have been minimized, and ultimately to learn how to continuously improve execution. This is the process of Procedure Analysis.
Figure 13 – Procedure Analysis Shows How Well the Planned Procedures Were Executed
Similarly, as Figure 14 below suggests, there is also a need to monitor how accurately operating instructions have been executed – this is accomplished through Operations Monitoring. For process monitoring, the best practice is to monitor all key variables against their targets and boundaries on a periodic basis (e.g. every few minutes) and to roll up deviations into time-based or shift-based statistics.
Where safe operating limits have been exceeded for unacceptable durations, alerts (e-mail or report) will be automatically generated and sent to relevant owners of the variable/asset affected.
Where instruction targets (quality, yield, throughput, etc.) have been missed, there is a need to integrate the ‘loss’, to evaluate the economic impact, and to assign a cause or ‘reason code’. This helps later analysis of the major ‘bad actors’ contributing to poor business performance and to prioritise efforts to correct the highest impact problems.
Figure 14 – Operations Monitoring Shows How Well the Planned Operating Envelope Was Executed
For movements, shipments, and mode changes; the timing, line-ups, actual flows, and movement events may be monitored to ensure the correct products move to the correct tanks, that inventory is not spilled, that contamination is avoided, and to explain missed shipments or missed receipts or even missed movements.
Data Reconciliation and Yield Accounting is a critical business function. Huge quantities of process and other data must be processed to ensure that business systems receive accurate records of actual events and transactions at the process level.
Yield accounting involves data gathering, data validation, processing and calculations, data reconciliation (use redundant or ‘excess’ measurements to identify and assign errors), calculation of mass and material balances, identification of missing materials/movements, and overall explanation of errors.
The feedback from yield accounting function supports both the operational groups and the business organisations in providing key reconciled and validated data for further processing.
Depending on industry, this business function may also include Batch Tracking / Lot tracing, or Allocations - see Figure 15 below.
Figure 15 – Yield Accounting Shows How Well the Original Plan Was Executed
Ultimately, the yield accounting data is consolidated with other information from manufacturing and business strategy into overall reported results (see Figure 16). This information forms feedback to the business and to shareholders on the overall effectiveness of the manufacturing execution cycle (Business Results).
The speed and efficiency with which data and workflow progress around the cycle is an indication of the effectiveness of the manufacturing organisation.
Figure 16 – Business Results Show How Well the Business Strategy Was Executed
World class and leading manufacturing businesses have adopted a rigorous approach to understand the key elements of the cycle which most drive their specific business. Through Performance Management they then invest capital and resources to ensure processes and applications deliver benefits in these critical business areas.
The gaps or deviations between planned (targets) and actual (historic) performance are an indication of how well a manufacturing site is performing at any level of the enterprise. Deviations may be due to inaccurate planning models, poor translation of plans to schedules, bad execution, errors in measurement of results, or simply lack of sufficient information.
Management of the cycle requires these deviations to be monitored in a consistent way at all levels since each level is simply a different expression of a business requirement – progressively translated into engineering units from planning down to process control, and progressively translated back into business units from process control back to business results.
Giving each function a means to measure their performance (deviations) in units that they understand is critical; but it is also important to recognise the hierarchy of performance and the relationships between each level. It is also extremely important that these deviations are fed back to the strategic planning process to ensure continuous improvement in the overall business performance and work flow, as depicted in Figure 17.
To conclude, a single consistent performance management system is a key way to track deviations throughout different enterprise levels, while maintaining the linkage between levels. Deviations in business results versus plans may be tracked through a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tree to the level(s) and function(s) where the main causes lie.
This enables organisations to rapidly identify, focus on, and remedy problems that have a high level of business impact; while providing each level with it’s own performance metrics in units and parameters that it can directly control/influence/improve.
Figure 17 – Consistently Comparing Plan and Actual Drives Continuous Improvement
Operational Excellence in the Real World
- The typical drivers for automation include-Business Efficiency-Manufacturing efficiency-Manufacturing agility, flexibility-Supply chain efficiency-Decision Support-Turning data into information-Sharing information-Capturing information-Avoiding Abnormal Situations-Avoiding equipment failures-Continuous Improvement-Performance measuring-Work flows and best practices-Changing roles of people
With an integrated and a holistic view of the business processes in refinery and petrochemical business, one must make best use of the available automation technologies to enable operational excellence.
To address these issues, the concepts of Operational Excellence as shown in the previous section need to be translated to real-world Solutions.
This starts with selecting standard, world-class Solution Components that have a proven industry track record. But the realisation of Operational Excellence Solutions is not a matter of just deploying these point solutions – instead, it is about integrating these Solution Components to form a end-to-end, seamless Solution.
This is achieved through a consulting effort where the ‘As-Is’ situation is compared to the ‘To-Be’ situation and a roadmap is developed – addressing business requirements and available (possibly multi-vendor) technology.
Figure 18 – Turning the Operational Excellence Vision into an Operational Excellence Reality
At Honeywell, working with industry-leading manufacturers we have successfully taken the concepts of Operational Excellence and turned them into reality – providing Automation Solutions that span the complete business process of an enterprise from the boardroom to the field.
As shown in the concepts, this means connecting traditionally separate departments (such sales, procurement, planning, scheduling, operations management, production management, engineering, and maintenance) by integrating their workflows while providing visibility across the entire supply chain.
As an example, the final figure below (Figure 19) shows how such a real-world integrated Solution looks like (here shown for an LNG liquefaction facility). Similar end-to-end Solutions have been deployed for refineries and petrochemical facilities – providing our customers with a step-change in business performance. This is proof that Holistic Operational Excellence Solutions are the way of the future.
Figure 19 – A Real-World Operational Excellence Solution Can Only Be Created Through End-to-End Integration of All Automation Tools at All Levels of the Organisation. This Illustration Shows Holistic Supply Chain Management for an LNG Facility.
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BIO DATA
Author
Tathagata Basu – Regional Business Development Manager, Honeywell Middle EastA Chemical Engineer by trade, Tathagata has a Post Graduate Degree in Marketing from the Indian Institute of Management and over 18 years of industrial experience. He joined Honeywell in India in 1999 and performed different sales and consulting roles in the Advanced Applications business of Honeywell Process Solutions. Currently based in Doha, Qatar he is responsible for sales consulting and solutions business for Honeywell Process Solutions for the Middle East region. Tathagata has been responsible for many “firsts” in Honeywell and is a key member of the Advanced Solutions global team.
Significant Contributors
Paul Brice – Sales Leader, HPS Advance Solutions, Honeywell Europe, Middle East and AfricaA Chemical Engineer and MBA with over 25 years of experience in the process industries. Paul joined Honeywell in 2000 and is currently responsible for Advanced Solutions sales and consulting services across EMEA. “Our solutions are only sold on the basis of value. Our role is to identify where we can add business value and operational improvement in our customers business, to deliver and prove this value through the implementation of advanced applications and organisational/workflow changes, and to sustain and increase value by maintaining and improving solutions over time”.
Arjen van den Broecke – Sales Leader for Manufacturing Excellence Solutions, Honeywell Europe, Middle East and Africa
Arjen is Honeywell's MES Sales Leader for the EMEA region. In this role, he works with clients as Automation Consultant to implement holistic automation solutions that address not only the traditional MES space, but leverage Honeywell's complete automation portfolio. This includes Value Chain Management, Production Management, Operations Management, Operator Effectiveness, and Asset Effectiveness solutions.
Arjen has a degree in Chemical Engineering and Computer Sciences. After a career as Process Development Engineer in the Petrochemical Industry, he held various Engineering and Management positions in an Advanced Process Control company before joining Honeywell Advanced Solutions in 2001.
For more information Please visit Honeywell website at www.honeywell.com/ps/sea
Refining and Petrochemical Industries are today faced with numerous challenges including higher energy prices, more compliance requirements, and increasing supply chain complexities (see Figure 1) - all compounded by a shrinking workforce that needs to respond faster to handle more complex processes.This situation needs a concerted and focused approach to achieve Operational Excellence.
Figure 1 – More Issues, Less PeopleIt is critical to take a holistic approach to Operational Excellence, focussing on delivering performance and benefits resulting from improved workflow and best practices across the entire manufacturing environment - addressing all the aspects of people, asset effectiveness, process effectiveness, as well as business agility.
The Concepts of Operational ExcellenceA complete vision for Operational Excellence includes the basic automation layers (DCS, Historian) as well as Advanced Process Control (APC), asset management (AM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (‘traditional’ MES). Historically, these disciplines are treated independently, but world-class enterprises realise that all of these are really interconnected and require an integrated approach. Modern Manufacturing Excellence Solutions (the ‘new’ MES) extend well beyond the traditional boundaries of the solution space, and are oriented towards achieving holistic operational excellence.
When addressed together, they provide the infrastructure to • Improve business agility continuously through the swift alignment of manufacturing with changing business objectives and strategies; • Decrease costs by increasing production rates, lowering specific energy and raw material costs, streamlining supply and distribution, optimising product specifications, and reducing specific waste and emissions; • Enable product and process innovation through new products, new specifications and different product mixes; • Improve quality thanks to predictability and consistency.
Operational Excellence comes from a better understanding of the increasing complexity of manufacturing processes and from understanding and managing the value chain that it is part of. Increasing market pressures, regulation, and accountability force enterprises to do things right the first time, while maintaining a safe and secure environment for its employees and surroundings. This can only be achieved through holistic operational excellence solutions that create an environment where each employee performs his or her tasks perfectly, making good decisions based on timely and accurate information, avoiding incidents and human error and working in collaboration with others, all the while improving these activities continuously.
Figure 2 (below) represents the entire operating space of a manufacturing business. The y-axis represents levels or hierarchies in a manufacturing business. It starts from the shop-floor level (process focus) and moves to the strategic level (enterprise focus) through the operational level (operations focus) and tactical level (business focus).
The x-axis represents decision-making and review timeframes. The middle of the x-axis signifies the current time (‘now’). To the right, it shows time in the future and to the left it shows time in the past.
Everything in a manufacturing business exists in this space - including equipment, people, functional groups, data, information, and the work processes that link them. This also represents the same space in which holistic operation excellence play a critical role in improving our customer’s business results.
Figure 2 – The Manufacturing Space The fundamental starting point for Operational Excellence is a Safe and Secure Environment, as shown below in Figure 3. This includes physical safety (such as access control, visitor management, localisation of people and assets, closed-circuit television, or digital video applications), but also includes the often overlooked cyber security.
Figure 3 – Safety & Security are Fundamental to Operational Excellence The next fundamental layer is Common Data and Visualisation, as shown below in Figure 4.
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.
The common data infrastructure provides validation, integration, and consistency (‘one version of the truth’). The architecture of the data infrastructure should also protect critical sub-systems (like the process control network) from higher level access.
Figure 4 – Common Data & Visualisation are Fundamental to Operational Excellence
A third fundamental pillar is a set of Common Limits and Boundaries (shown in figure 5) that set the operating envelope of the business, process, and equipments that are critical to a manufacturing enterprise.
At the business level, market share, distribution networks, pricing, and similar factors represent the envelope in which decisions must be made.
At the operations level, critical pressures, temperatures, constraints, environmental limits, safety limits, etc. represent the operating envelope in which the process may be safely and efficiently operated.
Where multiple limits apply to specific functions or operating mode or equipment, the limits should be ‘nested’ to ensure that no lower-level limit can be set above another limit in the hierarchy (for instance, an alarm limit cannot be set higher than the design limit).
Limits and boundaries should be stored in a common structure with rigorous change management processes and accountabilities fixed. Some limit sets (alarm limits for example) should be enforced routinely to avoid ‘creeping’ from acceptable positions.
Figure 5 – Common Limits & Boundaries are Fundamental to Operational Excellence
Based on these three fundamental layers, the manufacturing processes are executed. The following figures show these processes and how they should be integrated.
Figure 6 shows the Strategic Planning. This Supply Chain Management function takes place at the business or strategic level for decisions that have longer 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. A representative medium-term planning activity would be a processing plan for specific feeds on specific units running under specific operating conditions to meet available to promise (ATP) targets.
Figure 6 – Strategic Supply Chain Planning is the Top Process of Operational Excellence
The output of the Strategic Planning process is the input for the Operational Planning process, shown in Figure 7.
The refining and petrochemical businesses have been using multi-period model-based planning systems for decades. However, it is important that the models are kept up-to-date with current unit configurations, process constraints and available feeds. It is also 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 takes the consolidated planning results and creates 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.
First quartile refinery and petrochemical businesses require optimised schedules based on business requirements so as to maximise responsiveness to new market opportunities, to minimise inventory, to minimise risk to specific contracts and shipments, etc. This is important since a simulation based schedule may not always be the optimised schedule. It takes away a lot of the subjectivity from this critical activity.
Figure 7 – Operational Planning & Scheduling Process
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.
Operations Management includes the tools to communicate the schedule to operations groups as a series of instructions by process and operating area. For example, off-sites will receive a schedule of blending campaign and movements instructions; process areas receive operating modes, throughput targets, expected yields, quality estimates, target tankage, instructions for switching times, and targets operating conditions (cracking temperature range, maximise cut width, maximise throughput, etc.).
Operating instructions should contain all relevant targets and limits for the scheduled operations. These should be validated against the boundary database (remember: Common Limits & Boundaries), and should automatically update the targets in the control room at the point that they are implemented. This process is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8 – Operations Management Helps Communicating the Schedule
Operating instructions contain information and directions for changing operating modes, operating conditions, line-ups, etc. Changing conditions and equipment services introduces the potential for process upsets, disturbances, hazards, and costly excursions outside of normal operating boundaries. Procedure Execution describes solutions that minimise these risks by identifying and delivering consistent best practices for all modes of operation.
In its simplest form, procedural execution (shown in Figure 9, below) ensures operations have the appropriate up-to-date documentation and procedures available at the point of change execution. More sophisticated solutions use rigorous automated and/or remote handheld device workflow applications to ensure consistent and safe procedural execution.Figure 9 – Procedural Execution Helps Avoiding Mistakes and Misunderstandings
As shown in Figure 10, in a modern refinery or petrochemical facility most procedures are finally executed through some form of digital distributed Control System.
At this level, the business is control focused and needs to take decisions that have a very high impact on the immediate term. Control systems are the interface between the softer side of business consisting of policies, plans and decisions and the hardware and equipment which finally transform these decisions to profits.
A modern open distributed control system platform is key to managing process and business information and workflow at the control room and engineering levels. The process control system is unique as it operates practically in real time; gathering and processing data, controlling process conditions, executing commands and is the point where perhaps the highest volume of data is processed with the highest frequency in the business cycle. Problems in the control system layer can have large consequences for the business, either through single high impact events or through a long sequence of relatively small ‘offsets’.
Figure 10 – The Process Control Layer
It is critical that operators and engineers can effectively manage the complex relationship between business requirements and process/equipment performance. This complexity has increased significantly over recent years as specifications and regulations have become more stringent and business performance is managed more directly.
At the same time operator skills and experience have been reduced as the workforce ages and fewer people are trained and employed in plants with increasing levels automation. Operator Effectiveness tools (shown in Figure 11) are a critical part of reducing the mundane tasks that operators and engineers need to perform - freeing them up to manage business performance and to optimise process conditions and equipment health.
Available tools include: - Advanced process control and optimisation to manage complex set point manipulation for maximum process performance and stability that drive processes against constraints and maximise business value;
- Electronic logbooks that eliminate manual handling of process data from screen to paper, automatically transfer events, alarm summaries, task lists, and operating instructions between shifts and across functions;
-Movements automation that creates, controls, monitors, and reports material movements across site; Alarm management and effective operator HMI’s (Human-Machine Interfaces) to reduce reaction times and to avoid misinterpretation of process conditions and identify required actions;
-Operator training simulators (OTS) to train operators to operate the process both in and outside safe boundaries, to fine tune their responses, to execute procedures, and to enhance their skills to minimise/eliminate human error caused upsets and problems.Figure 11 – Operator Effectiveness Tools as the Key to Operational Excellence
In the imperfect world that we live in, plans and instructions rarely translate into exact execution. Even if they do, best practice in any function of a business will require capturing the actual data against the planned targets to have good functional performance management at all levels in the organisation.
As we move away from the real time environment into ‘history’, the first priority is to understand how well our process and equipment is performing – Asset Effectiveness. Please see Figure 12, below.
Diagnostics tools give operators direct feedback about the current state of the process and equipment assets e.g. heat exchanger fouling, emissions, compressor efficiency, column flooding, valve stiction, catalyst activity, etc.
Monitoring of process control loop performance tells us when and where to tune and focus maintenance activities, tightening up control and improving responsiveness, quality, and constraint compliance.
Measuring corrosion gives short and long term guidance for both operational and maintenance groups to improve performance and extend the life of plant assets.
Monitoring equipment health using information from field equipment, vibration monitors, sensors, and inferential process measurements gives operators, maintenance, and engineering functions actionable information about the health and life-expectancy of equipment, catalyst, and the overall process.
All this information develops over time to feed back into planning about the impact of decisions on plant state and health so that these can be factored into future decisions (e.g. new boundary conditions) where they critically impact business performance.
Maintenance groups can also use this information to develop reliability-centred maintenance strategies that optimise maintenance efforts, identify faulty equipment, and help them design better long-term protection strategies.
Figure 12 – Asset Effectiveness is a Broad Topic Enabled by Historical Data Capture
As we move further into history, it is important to measure how effectively procedures have been executed (shown in Figure 13) and to ensure product quality is consistent, process integrity has not been compromised, energy consumption and emissions have been minimized, and ultimately to learn how to continuously improve execution. This is the process of Procedure Analysis.
Figure 13 – Procedure Analysis Shows How Well the Planned Procedures Were Executed
Similarly, as Figure 14 below suggests, there is also a need to monitor how accurately operating instructions have been executed – this is accomplished through Operations Monitoring. For process monitoring, the best practice is to monitor all key variables against their targets and boundaries on a periodic basis (e.g. every few minutes) and to roll up deviations into time-based or shift-based statistics.
Where safe operating limits have been exceeded for unacceptable durations, alerts (e-mail or report) will be automatically generated and sent to relevant owners of the variable/asset affected.
Where instruction targets (quality, yield, throughput, etc.) have been missed, there is a need to integrate the ‘loss’, to evaluate the economic impact, and to assign a cause or ‘reason code’. This helps later analysis of the major ‘bad actors’ contributing to poor business performance and to prioritise efforts to correct the highest impact problems.
Figure 14 – Operations Monitoring Shows How Well the Planned Operating Envelope Was Executed
For movements, shipments, and mode changes; the timing, line-ups, actual flows, and movement events may be monitored to ensure the correct products move to the correct tanks, that inventory is not spilled, that contamination is avoided, and to explain missed shipments or missed receipts or even missed movements.
Data Reconciliation and Yield Accounting is a critical business function. Huge quantities of process and other data must be processed to ensure that business systems receive accurate records of actual events and transactions at the process level.
Yield accounting involves data gathering, data validation, processing and calculations, data reconciliation (use redundant or ‘excess’ measurements to identify and assign errors), calculation of mass and material balances, identification of missing materials/movements, and overall explanation of errors.
The feedback from yield accounting function supports both the operational groups and the business organisations in providing key reconciled and validated data for further processing.
Depending on industry, this business function may also include Batch Tracking / Lot tracing, or Allocations - see Figure 15 below.
Figure 15 – Yield Accounting Shows How Well the Original Plan Was Executed
Ultimately, the yield accounting data is consolidated with other information from manufacturing and business strategy into overall reported results (see Figure 16). This information forms feedback to the business and to shareholders on the overall effectiveness of the manufacturing execution cycle (Business Results).
The speed and efficiency with which data and workflow progress around the cycle is an indication of the effectiveness of the manufacturing organisation.
Figure 16 – Business Results Show How Well the Business Strategy Was Executed
World class and leading manufacturing businesses have adopted a rigorous approach to understand the key elements of the cycle which most drive their specific business. Through Performance Management they then invest capital and resources to ensure processes and applications deliver benefits in these critical business areas.
The gaps or deviations between planned (targets) and actual (historic) performance are an indication of how well a manufacturing site is performing at any level of the enterprise. Deviations may be due to inaccurate planning models, poor translation of plans to schedules, bad execution, errors in measurement of results, or simply lack of sufficient information.
Management of the cycle requires these deviations to be monitored in a consistent way at all levels since each level is simply a different expression of a business requirement – progressively translated into engineering units from planning down to process control, and progressively translated back into business units from process control back to business results.
Giving each function a means to measure their performance (deviations) in units that they understand is critical; but it is also important to recognise the hierarchy of performance and the relationships between each level. It is also extremely important that these deviations are fed back to the strategic planning process to ensure continuous improvement in the overall business performance and work flow, as depicted in Figure 17.
To conclude, a single consistent performance management system is a key way to track deviations throughout different enterprise levels, while maintaining the linkage between levels. Deviations in business results versus plans may be tracked through a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tree to the level(s) and function(s) where the main causes lie.
This enables organisations to rapidly identify, focus on, and remedy problems that have a high level of business impact; while providing each level with it’s own performance metrics in units and parameters that it can directly control/influence/improve.
Figure 17 – Consistently Comparing Plan and Actual Drives Continuous Improvement
Operational Excellence in the Real World
- The typical drivers for automation include-Business Efficiency-Manufacturing efficiency-Manufacturing agility, flexibility-Supply chain efficiency-Decision Support-Turning data into information-Sharing information-Capturing information-Avoiding Abnormal Situations-Avoiding equipment failures-Continuous Improvement-Performance measuring-Work flows and best practices-Changing roles of people
With an integrated and a holistic view of the business processes in refinery and petrochemical business, one must make best use of the available automation technologies to enable operational excellence.
To address these issues, the concepts of Operational Excellence as shown in the previous section need to be translated to real-world Solutions.
This starts with selecting standard, world-class Solution Components that have a proven industry track record. But the realisation of Operational Excellence Solutions is not a matter of just deploying these point solutions – instead, it is about integrating these Solution Components to form a end-to-end, seamless Solution.
This is achieved through a consulting effort where the ‘As-Is’ situation is compared to the ‘To-Be’ situation and a roadmap is developed – addressing business requirements and available (possibly multi-vendor) technology.
Figure 18 – Turning the Operational Excellence Vision into an Operational Excellence Reality
At Honeywell, working with industry-leading manufacturers we have successfully taken the concepts of Operational Excellence and turned them into reality – providing Automation Solutions that span the complete business process of an enterprise from the boardroom to the field.
As shown in the concepts, this means connecting traditionally separate departments (such sales, procurement, planning, scheduling, operations management, production management, engineering, and maintenance) by integrating their workflows while providing visibility across the entire supply chain.
As an example, the final figure below (Figure 19) shows how such a real-world integrated Solution looks like (here shown for an LNG liquefaction facility). Similar end-to-end Solutions have been deployed for refineries and petrochemical facilities – providing our customers with a step-change in business performance. This is proof that Holistic Operational Excellence Solutions are the way of the future.
Figure 19 – A Real-World Operational Excellence Solution Can Only Be Created Through End-to-End Integration of All Automation Tools at All Levels of the Organisation. This Illustration Shows Holistic Supply Chain Management for an LNG Facility.
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BIO DATA
Author
Tathagata Basu – Regional Business Development Manager, Honeywell Middle EastA Chemical Engineer by trade, Tathagata has a Post Graduate Degree in Marketing from the Indian Institute of Management and over 18 years of industrial experience. He joined Honeywell in India in 1999 and performed different sales and consulting roles in the Advanced Applications business of Honeywell Process Solutions. Currently based in Doha, Qatar he is responsible for sales consulting and solutions business for Honeywell Process Solutions for the Middle East region. Tathagata has been responsible for many “firsts” in Honeywell and is a key member of the Advanced Solutions global team.
Significant ContributorsPaul Brice – Sales Leader, HPS Advance Solutions, Honeywell Europe, Middle East and AfricaA Chemical Engineer and MBA with over 25 years of experience in the process industries. Paul joined Honeywell in 2000 and is currently responsible for Advanced Solutions sales and consulting services across EMEA. “Our solutions are only sold on the basis of value. Our role is to identify where we can add business value and operational improvement in our customers business, to deliver and prove this value through the implementation of advanced applications and organisational/workflow changes, and to sustain and increase value by maintaining and improving solutions over time”.
Arjen van den Broecke – Sales Leader for Manufacturing Excellence Solutions, Honeywell Europe, Middle East and Africa
Arjen is Honeywell's MES Sales Leader for the EMEA region. In this role, he works with clients as Automation Consultant to implement holistic automation solutions that address not only the traditional MES space, but leverage Honeywell's complete automation portfolio. This includes Value Chain Management, Production Management, Operations Management, Operator Effectiveness, and Asset Effectiveness solutions.
Arjen has a degree in Chemical Engineering and Computer Sciences. After a career as Process Development Engineer in the Petrochemical Industry, he held various Engineering and Management positions in an Advanced Process Control company before joining Honeywell Advanced Solutions in 2001.
For more information Please visit Honeywell website at www.honeywell.com/ps/sea
