operational excellence
Impact Laboratories’ operational excellence
Impact Laboratories experts have a long and successful track record of delivering high-value Operational Excellence programs within petrochemicals and related sectors. This value can readily reach in excess of $10-$100M per annum financially and also provide a competitive edge in markets plus improved relations with employees, regulators and shareholders
“Operationally Excellent Companies are committed to continuous improvement and deliver a combination of Quality, Price, Service and Product Expertise that no-one else in the Market can match”
Impact Laboratories can help you today, improve your bottom line profitability and overall competitiveness through customized improvement programs, so why not let us show you how?
Operational Excellence starts with the basics and requires:
Impact experts use a combination of detailed industry knowledge, technical know-how and best practice change management and continuous improvement methodologies (including 6-Sigma tools) to help you improve your performance in rapid time and then to sustain this level of high performance. Here are 2 simple models we demonstrate our approach and help you visualize how major improvements can be started and maintained.
Considerable additional value can be generated by simplifying critical workflows within organisations or in simple language, removing barriers and low-value work. Impact’s experts have considerable experience of simplifying existing or developing new approaches and systems to improve workflow and remove wasteful operations.
For example, Impact designed for a new system for managing engineering work requests related to a client’s annual CAPEX spend of $10million per annum. Inefficiencies and lack of clarity led to major delays in delivery and subsequent additional costs both in engineering delivery but also in overall plant reliability.
Impact designed and delivered a new management system based upon the project management system illustrated below, including delivery of the required training.
We begin a Quality Improvement Programme by introducing some simple 6-Sigma metrics and language to describe the quality performance and get a common way of looking at what Quality is and how it might be improved.
We then execute a detailed Improvement Opportunity Study by focusing on both process and QC laboratory capability. The study will quantify the cost and revenue benefits to be gained from the existing baseline, the project plans and resources required to achieve them-AND in a sustainable way for the client through organization development and training for its key people.
Impact acts as project manager throughout -from study to delivery of final and sustainable operations with attractive benefits to offset project costs often by a minimum factor of 10 to 1.
A key step in the overall programme is to introduce Impact’s proprietary Performance Monitoring Software, “PlantHealth” .
Through data study, development of new detailed operating instructions, operator training, QC Lab optimization and use of PlantHealth, overall product variability can be reduced by up to 50%, and transition times can be reduced by up to 20%.
If appropriate, another software tool LabHealth can be installed in the QC lab to ensure compliance to ISO 17025 at all times as well as ensuring QC data to the plants is also of high quality.
The Business Benefit: Increased customer satisfaction, reduced off-grade and wide-specification product which can amount to $1million plus per production line.
There are many possible negative factors that may inhibit polyolefin catalysts from working at maximum productivity. Annual catalyst costs of around 3% of net polymer costs on a modern world-scale plant can easily reach $10-20m/annum. Therefore a loss of productivity of only 10% can be very costly indeed.
These negative influences on catalysts will also affect product quality, leading to further financial losses.
Impact’s catalyst experts can identify and rectify all possible causes of reduced catalyst activity. In the example shown below, a combination of improved handling, modified reactor conditions and installation of a new purification system resulted in a 30% improvement in productivity-and all within 6 months. What a payback!