Operational Excellence in Process Industries

Today's process manufacturers are faced with a volatile economy, intense competition and rising energy/material costs. Improving operational for margin purposes, but also for long term success. Cost reduction and quality/productivity improvement have now become key levers for gaining competitive advantage. Operational excellence is the pursuit of conducting business in a manner that continuously improves the quality of goods and services, reduces to achieve competitive superiority. From a core manufacturing point of view, there are three pillars of operational excellence; they are production planning & control, manufacturing execution and operational effectiveness of people, processes and assets. Tight coordination among these three pillars is required in order to achieve overall operational excellence. In this paper we highlight the key elements for operational excellence in process industries, as well as an incremental approach that manufacturers can take to achieve success. Some in due course of their journey of operational excellence are also listed in this paper. Overview Global competitiveness is placing tremendous pressure on cost, quality and responsiveness to customer demands. Some of the key challenges in the process industry are lack of visibility and control into manufacturing exceptions and events orders and carry out production operations in a predictable manner. Managers and production personnel cannot measure, monitor, and control performance in real time across people, are expended in quality-genealogy-related documentation, tracking and auditing to ensure compliance. To be successful, it is important to understand how to leverage information technologies/ systems and automation, to provide visibility, of the process operations.