Enhancing Performance Management in the Batch Process Industries Application Brief
About AspenTech AspenTech is a leading supplier of software that optimizes process manufacturing for energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, engineering and construction, and other industries that manufacture and produce products from a chemical process. With integrated aspenone solutions, process manufacturers can implement best practices for optimizing their engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. As a result, AspenTech customers are better able to increase capacity, improve margins, reduce costs, and become more energy efficient. To see how the world s leading process manufacturers rely on AspenTech to achieve their operational excellence goals, visit www.aspentech.com.
Batch Process Industry Overview The batch process industry is very diverse with broad product specifications and varied production processes. The ability to monitor production performance in real-time combined with the flexibility to make adjustments to the process and products quickly is important. Batch processes typically make smaller volumes of more complex products adhering to predefined recipes. Producing a consistent quality product in an optimal cycle time is a critical business requirement. Batch process industry companies are challenged with shifting global manufacturing trends that require the application of intellectual property to new areas as well as modifications to existing product portfolios to meet changing market demands. Companies must become more innovative and agile so they can quickly develop and manufacture new products with higher value in use characteristics, enabling them to shift their offerings to higher margin products. Batch manufacturers must also find new and innovative ways to leverage the expertise of employees across worldwide enterprise operations to most effectively utilize resources and gain efficiencies. While adapting to address these challenges, manufacturer s also need to execute flawlessly, manage performance and deliver products meeting constantly evolving customer expectations to remain competitive and achieve a higher level of profitability. Challenges Good performance management requires the collection, analysis and visualization of process information in a meaningful context. To maximize the benefits of this information, data must be delivered to the user properly formatted with the right granularity and in a timely manner. Efficiency is lost when key resources spend time manipulating data to get information into a usable format to perform daily tasks. Within the batch industry, there are unique complexities which require special attention. The flexibility for data to be recorded and reported as batch segments, the ability to analyze performance real time versus an ideal batch profile and make operational adjustments, and the functionality to easily develop and view KPIs, Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts, and reports are requirements to drive manufacturing excellence within batch manufacturing. Below are several key performance management challenges that batch industry manufacturer s face: Challenge Data Accessibility and Usability Visualization and Reporting Description Data is only valuable when it is easily accessed by the right individuals at the right time. This means that regardless of location, designated users should be able to easily and quickly get to the information that they need in the format they need it in. Additionally, not all users are going to use information management solutions daily, so it is important to provide an easy-to-use method for sharing of data. Different users want to see information in different ways and with varying granularities. Good visualization tools must provide the flexibility to easily establish multiple viewing scenarios such as process graphics, trends, KPIs and reports with drill down capabilities. Additionally, the information may need to be shared with many users across an organization, some of whom may not have access to specific vendor client software for visualization. Analysis User s need easy-to-use tools that, when applied, help to convert raw data into actionable intelligence. These tools must support efficient handling of large amounts of data, quick identification of problem areas and monitoring of actual performance against expected or target performance. 1
Featured Solutions aspenone Production Management and Execution (PM&E) offers a comprehensive set of data collection, performance analysis and visualization tools to help batch process industry leaders achieve manufacturing excellence by establishing best practices to increase profitability, reduce variability, and improve asset utilization. Aspen InfoPlus.21 is an industry leading real-time and process history database that serves as the foundation of data collection and accessibility for the aspenone PM&E suite. When Aspen InfoPlus.21 is combined with Aspen Production Record Manager, which captures and organizes batches, phases, runs, tests, campaigns, etc., the entire production process within the batch manufacturing business context is captured, stored, and available to support manufacturing excellence efforts. Other products and product features within aspenone PM&E that help address performance management challenges in the batch process industries include: Aspen InfoPlus.21 Mobile Aspen IP.21 Process Browser Aspen Process Explorer Aspen KPI Builder Microsoft Excel Process Data Add-in Process Explorer Ribbon Aspen Golden Batch Profiler Aspen Role Based Visualization Aspen Real-Time Statistical Process Control Analyzer Below are details on how two expanded features available in the recently released aspenone V7.3 can provide value to batch process industry manufacturers. Enhanced Microsoft Excel Process Data Add-In While a Microsoft Excel Process Data Add-in has been available within Aspen InfoPlus.21 for quite some time, the tools have been enhanced in V7.3 to improve user effectiveness and extend the value of the capabilities to batch manufacturers. Figure 1. Excel Process Data Add-In Ribbon and Improved Workflow 2
Example: An environmental engineer in the corporate organization periodically must review and report data from each of the manufacturing plants in the company. He does not have an Aspen InfoPlus.21 client machine, but he is very well versed at using standard corporate desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SharePoint. The environmental engineer visits the site and is talking with a process engineer who quickly shows him how he is using the V7.3 Microsoft Excel Process Data Add-in and publishing directly to SharePoint. The environmental engineer quickly realizes that he can save tremendous time and effort using this methodology. Currently, he is getting large, static Excel files emailed to him on a monthly basis and then is manually manipulating data in a spreadsheet before generating his monthly report. He must do this with each site he covers. He opens the tag browser within Excel, drags and drops his preferred tags to the spreadsheet and designates the tag attributes he normally uses. He then quickly selects a combination of current, historical and calculated values available from the ribbon. He saves templates so that he can easily replicate and modify as needed. He creates a dynamic summary report that provides monthly stream analysis. He then applies this same report to the other eight facilities he is responsible for, substantially reducing the data handling and manual report creation he was doing previously. This allows him to focus more of his time and effort on root cause analysis and working with the plant to put more preventative measures in place to reduce violations of environmental limits. Monthly Stream Analysis Report Boston Plant Month of July 2011 Figure 2. Excel Process Data Add-in Published to SharePoint 3
Introduction of Aspen InfoPlus.21 Mobile The introduction of Aspen InfoPlus.21 Mobile enables data access anytime, anywhere. This smartphone application provides users across the enterprise the ability to access and analyze real-time and historical plant data from an Aspen InfoPlus.21 database. Data can be viewed in value fields, trended, reported by exception, or accessed in KPIs so that users can format the information to maximize the value for individual job functions. Example 1: A process engineer is responsible for multiple sites within the region. In transit between two sites, a production problem occurs at the site that she left two hours ago. In the past, she would not have even been aware of the issue until Operations called. She would also have no way of troubleshooting until she arrived at the second site and was able to connect remotely to the Aspen InfoPlus.21 system to troubleshoot. With Aspen InfoPlus.21 Mobile, she actually received an alert email that the R-100 temperature had dipped below the low alarm level. Since she has access to all of the sites she covers from her mobile phone, she uses the menu hierarchy established during setup to quickly access tags from the plant with the issue. She is able to call up several trends and KPIs and then drill down into specific values to see that the dip was caused by a catalyst solid plugging the line and it looks to have cleared quick enough so that it should not impact product quality. She communicates this to the Operations team and asks them to increase solvent flow in the catalyst line to ensure it does not happen again. Example 2: In the early evening after day workers have left the plant, the batch catalyst reactor in a polymer unit shuts down. It is critical that the reactor is brought back up quickly as they only have four hours of the existing catalyst batch remaining, so they will impact the main plant operations if the issue is not resolved. In the past, the operator would call out the on-call maintenance technician to come to the site and begin the troubleshooting process. It could take some time for the technician to arrive at the site, evaluate and diagnose the issue, make trips between the catalyst area and the maintenance shop, etc. With Aspen InfoPlus.21 Mobile, the maintenance technician is quickly able to review several alerts that came into his mobile application and see that the initiating event that tripped the agitator was a low solvent flow. He then calls up some trends and determines that the solvent valve inlet to the catalyst batch reactor is not functioning properly. When he arrives at the site, he is able to get the tools he needs and a replacement valve, all before leaving the shop area for the plant. He reduces the time to troubleshoot and get the catalyst area on-line again by leveraging Aspen InfoPlus.21 Mobile. 4
Benefits Applying aspenone Production Management and Execution to challenges related to batch manufacturing performance management and analysis forms a foundation for achieving manufacturing excellence with a comprehensive data collection, visualization and performance analysis solution. Some common benefits are identified below: Function Data Collection Visualization Performance Analysis Feature Collect and store real-time process variables and batch process information Organize and present information about your process Run SQL compliant queries and reports Data collection system status management Bi-directional real-time communication with the shop floor Comprehensive graphics and plotting tools Display real-time data and quickly format data in meaningful context Easily customize dashboards and access KPI status summary plots Configure SPC information to display via histograms, Pareto charts, SPC charts, etc. Smartphone data access Publish to SharePoint Execute process and engineering calculations Batch process analysis and SPC Monitor real-time process parameters vs. golden profile Real-Time Event Definition and Management Establish key performance indicators Extensive Excel add-in capabilities 3Enables users to create and configure IO records directly from Excel 3Provides templates for system migrations 3Provides the ability to manage userspecified fields in tag records 3Facilitates the use of standard Excel tools to write and publish charts Benefit Facilitates improved decision-making, process improvement and troubleshooting Better understand and respond to changing process conditions through increased visibility into current and past process behavior Quickly create flexible and user-customized reports Enables ongoing monitoring, diagnostics and event notification of system health Simplifies and minimizes cost of integration through ease of data transfer between systems Simplifies and improves execution efficiency of routine engineering analysis tasks Easy to understand and respond to changing process conditions Intuitive navigation, graphics and content encourage quick user adoption Flexible viewing options maximize information value Expand access to data anytime, anywhere Disseminate information to a broad audience with standard desktop tools like Microsoft Excel and SharePoint Make faster and smarter production decisions Reduces variability and downtime, enabling customer quality requirements to be met Maintain consistent quality and cycle time Increases uptime, reduces event response time, and facilitates quality and equipment investigations Accelerates root cause analysis and tracks actual vs. target cost and performance Companies that take advantage of solutions such as aspenone Production Management and Execution will quickly realize these benefits and differentiate themselves from their competitors. 5
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