Digital Transformation for the Process Industries

A Roadmap

Osvaldo A. Bascur

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367222376
• eBook ISBN: 9781000165487
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Imagine if your process manufacturing plants were running so well that your production, safety, environmental, and profitability targets were being met so that your subject matter experts could focus on data-driven business improvements. Through proper use and analysis of your existing operations data, your company can become an industry leader and reward your stakeholders.

Written in an engaging and easily understandable manner, this book demonstrates a step-by-step process of how an organization can effectively utilize technology and make the necessary culture changes to achieve operational excellence. You will see how several industry-leading companies have used an effective real-time data infrastructure for mission-critical business use cases. The book also addresses challenges involved, such as effectively integrating operational (OT) data with business (IT) systems to enable a more proactive, predictive management model for a fleet of process plants.

Some of the things you will take away:

• Learn how a real-time data infrastructure enables transformation of raw sensor data into contextualized information for operational insights and business process improvement.
• Understand how reusing the same operational data for multiple use cases significantly impacts fleet management, profitability, and asset stewardship.
• See how a simple digital unit template representing production flows can be repeatedly used to identify critical inefficiencies in plant operations.
• Discover best practices of deploying real-time situational awareness alerts and predictive analytics.
• Realize how to transform your organization into a data-driven culture for continuous sustainable improvement.
• Find out how leading companies integrate operations data with business intelligence and predictive analytics tools in a corporate on-premises or cloud-enabled environment.
• Learn how industry-leading companies have imaginatively used a real-time data infrastructure to improve yields, reduce cycle times, and slash operating costs.

This book is targeted for process industries production and operations leadership, senior engineers, IT management, CIOs, and service providers to those industries. Academics will benefit from latest data analysis strategies. This book guides readers to use the best, results-proven approaches to ensure operational excellence.

1
Advancing to an Industrial Digital Data Infrastructure

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

W. Edwards Deming

The Disaster

It was a late-May gray day in South Texas. During this season, severe thunderstorms can disrupt the running of large industrial complexes. In this case, lightning hit an electrical transformer at the ProcIndustries oil refinery, causing it to overload and shut down one of their crude units.

That afternoon, Peter Argus was driving to his new job as a continuous-improvement manager at ProcIndustries when he heard the news on the radio: There had been an explosion at the company’s refinery.

The news report stated that an electrical transformer had exploded and caught fire, causing the refinery’s Crude Unit A to shut down. Peter knew that the refinery had two crude units. As Peter listened, he wondered about the ramifications for the people who worked at the refinery, and he decided to drive his pickup truck to the refinery rather than to the main office so he could observe the situation.

Peter wondered how prepared ProcIndustries was to handle this type of emergency. If it was just Crude Unit A affected as the radio news said, what would that mean? Was anyone hurt? What were the production losses? What was the environmental impact? Was the refinery workplace safe?

From his 15 years in the industry, including previous jobs in a power-generation facility and at a pulp and paper manufacturer, Peter knew that transformers are very stable. But like any piece of equipment, if a transformer is not maintained properly or is pushed to its limits, it will have problems and eventually break.

Peter parked far from the place where several crew members, firefighters, and a safety team were assessing the situation. He made sure his employee ID badge was showing as he approached. Peter saw many people were walking around to assess the damage. A man who Peter guessed was the plant manager instructed the crew to check for any process unit leaks, production losses, or environmental hazards caused by the lack of power (see the box “About the Process Unit”). The plant manager then talked to the authorities and reported that the fire was contained very quickly with no apparent injuries. While one production line was not operating, the plant manager said that preliminary checks at the refinery showed there did not appear to be any environmental damage.

ABOUT THE PROCESS UNIT

In this book, process unit is a term used to describe the area in a plant hosting the equipment required to transform raw materials into valuable semi-finished and finished products.

Peter was impressed that the plant manager appeared to have gained control of the situation and was working with emergency responders to handle this incident and its immediate aftermath. He wondered how the plant manager was able to find out information about the status of systems at the refinery and report it to the authorities at the scene.

As Peter climbed back into his pickup, he knew the incident would have ramifications for his new job at ProcIndustries. He was about to find out just how big those ramifications would be for his career and for the future of his new employer.

Journey to an Enterprise Industrial Digital Infrastructure

In this book, the character of Peter Argus represents managers at companies in a range of industries. They work with systems that track operation-related activities. However, they have a major challenge: They are not getting the information they need, when they need it, to make better decisions and improvements in their processes. As a result, their results are not as strong as they should be.

To survive, companies must create what Arie de Geus, the group planning coordinator for Royal Dutch Shell, called “the living company” (De Geus 1988). He theorized that the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s capability to learn faster than its competition. De Geus developed these strategies in the 1980s while looking for the secrets of corporate longevity and studying companies that had survived more than 100 years. He concluded that a company that involves everyone needed for execution in the planning and decision-making process will be more successful in a world which it does not control. De Geus concluded that it is not efficiency, but flexibility to adapt that an organization needs to survive. Companies must have methods, vision, and faith to institute a system that enables the existing staff to be flexible. People can alter the direction of the company with many small moves within and outside their domain (Kennedy 2002).

ProcIndustries is embarking on an operational excellence program. The company’s leaders are betting on the future: the digitization of their physical world through advancing technologies such as the industrial Internet of things (IoT). As such, by reevaluating what they have and building a digital data infrastructure, they will apply smart thinking, engineering, and analytic tools to proactively improve awareness and avoid operational losses. They will enable their people to succeed.

Of course, this kind of operation is not easy to achieve. At its root, the challenge may be that they are not using their existing plant information systems to their full capabilities. It may be that they need to update their current business performance methods to take advantage of new sensors and data analysis capabilities that provide real-time insights into operations (see the box “Managers at a Disadvantage without Real-Time Data”). Or it could be a combination of these two factors.

MANAGERS AT A DISADVANTAGE WITHOUT REAL-TIME DATA

Many enterprises face competitive challenges, volatility in their raw material supplies, and changes in work processes and regulatory regimes. The collection and analysis of detailed data about operations can empower frontline managers and workers at every level, helping them manage these challenges. A digital data infrastructure enables this capability and brings real-time visibility into operations to every level of the company, from frontline workers to their managers to the executive suite.

Although the exact factors may differ, the voyage to improvement has common traits and a common destination: an enterprise industrial data infrastructure (EIDI) that brings insights to plant teams so they can make better decisions to improve operations. With EIDI, one plant can share lessons with others, and the larger enterprise can collect these lessons and develop best practices that the organization can codify and build on for a more sustainable and profitable future.

That is the goal for Peter and his colleagues at ProcIndustries. There are four stages to the journey:

1. See the future. Plant teams need to recognize the potential and value of an EIDI and articulate their vision.
2. Gain management support and form the team. Achieving a successful EIDI means winning support from stakeholders to make the vision a reality. Creating a team of stakeholders to lead the EIDI implementation is an essential part of that effort.
3. Understand the barriers to success. Only through a detailed understanding of existing practices can an EIDI be implemented. This calls for learning about how work is accomplished, the roles in a plant, and how each team member uses data and shares data. It requires interviews and information exchange.
4. Proceed. Armed with stakeholder support, an understanding of current conditions, and a vision of the future, the team leading an EIDI effort can move forward to implement the initiative.

In this book, as in real life, some of these activities can overlap and occur simultaneously. For example, support for an EIDI project among some stakeholders can build as they begin to understand the company’s challenge and how an EIDI can help them. The journey itself can be hard work, but the destination is rewarding, not only for the team members who gain new skills but for the company as a whole.

Assessing the Current State

The next morning, Peter had a meeting scheduled at the South Texas refinery’s administration building with Tom Jordan, the plant manager. While driving to the office, Peter considered what he’d already learned about his company.

ProcIndustries is a downstream oil company that makes gasoline, diesel fuel, and other distillates and coke for the U.S. and international markets. For many years, ProcIndustries had been content to be a successful midsized independent refinery. During that time, the company had seen a dramatic rise in competition from overseas players as well as significant variability of the crude oil supply. This variability negatively impacted the refinery’s processing units, ultimately affecting run-time length and processing costs. In the past few years, they built several petrochemical plants to extend their value chain.

During interviews for his new job, Peter received a briefing on these trends and learned five pressing issues.

1. Changing raw materials, such as crude oil. The incoming available crude supplies show increasing contaminants, such as salts and solids. This trend has ramifications for production. Peter learned, for example, that ProcIndustries has seen a significant deterioration in its ability to adequately process crude oil laden with contaminants. In response, ProcIndustries altered its production equipment at the South Texas refinery. Although some of the problems were partially mitigated, they remained time-consuming issues for engineers, operators, and the company’s chemical vendor to manage.
   Because processing has become more complicated, it requires better communications between the planning, operations, and process engineering teams. It also requires additional and more frequent quality tests and improved equipment sensors.
2. Throughput limitations and rising energy requirements. The accumulation of unwanted materials, called fouling, is caused by an increase of contaminants and other changes in the properties of oil and can lead to throughput limitations. In addition, fouling can contribute to rising energy demand in the refinery process because of the significant reduction in the heat transfer rates required for production.
3. Fluctuating energy costs. Besides the challenge presented by the variability in raw materials, fluctuating energy costs have strained the electrical grid feeding the company’s four oil refineries. Recently, the company received requests to participate in smart grid initiatives to avoid problems with electric power distribution.
4. Environmental regulations. More stringent environmental regulations are putting significant pressure on ProcIndustries to ensure a virtual 100% compliance level on water reuse and water discharge requirements. For example, the refinery must have total control of benzene and other contaminants in water discharge, something mainly driven by the quality of raw materials being processed.
5. Safety regulations. ProcIndustries is also required to update its process safety management systems to comply with the new U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Authors
• Commonly Used Terms and Abbreviations
• 1. Advancing to an Industrial Digital Data Infrastructure
• 2. Building the Foundation
• 3. Using EIDI Data as a Strategic Asset
• 4. Advanced Analysis Using Unit Data and Event Templates
• 5. The Humans behind the Data: Visualization and Collaboration
• 6. Preventing Abnormal Situations
• 7. Energy Management and Operational Improvements
• 8. Successful Examples of Enterprise-Wide Digital Transformation
• 9. Beyond the Refinery—Connecting the Ecosystem
• 10. Operational and Business Analytics Integration
• 11. ProcIndustries Enterprise-Wide Rollout
• 12. The Future of the Digital Enterprise
• Index