Reader research: Digital view can boost results

Digital technology is enabling much more effective monitoring of plant operations – but are companies embracing the opportunity? A new ICIS survey, in association with Accenture, seeks to find out

The digital revolution is set to enhance the way chemical producers integrate their business along the supply chain and into the marketplace. Social, mobile, cloud and analytics technologies are converging, driven by advances in computing and the connectivity of the internet, leading to new business capabilities and opportunities. These include increased output, higher margins and enhanced safety.

While many firms are looking at how the cloud and internet can help bolster sales and marketing, few are picking up on the opportunities to enhance production capabilities and hence reduce operational expenditure and increase output. Neither are they fully seeing how they can improve safety, health and environment (SHE) performance.

The process industries have had digitally controlled plants for many years, points out Rich Clos, Accenture’s Chemicals and Natural Resources Digital Plant Lead for North America. But new interconnectivity and device mobility brings a great opportunity to make plants safer, more reliable and less costly to run.

There is scope here, he says, to create a new more integrated digital plant, with the convergence of process control technology and operations technology, perhaps under single management oversight.

“The scope includes enhanced predictive maintenance, more effective plant and emissions monitoring – whether by visual or thermographic means – better safety devices, and so on. Data from all of these areas can be hosted on the cloud and the data shared much more effectively than previously was the case”, he argues. The result, he explains, can be reduced plant downtime and more reliable operations, leading to greater output and, 
ultimately, higher margins.

The US chemical industry is going through a phase of intense capital investment that will likely last half a decade, driven by access to low cost shale-derived feedstocks and energy. But Clos is concerned that US plant owners are pressing ahead with these investments – in ethylene crackers and derivatives plant, as well as ammonia and methanol units – without investing in state-of-the-art operations technology.

It is, he says, almost as if they feel the margins will be good enough based on the feedstock advantage that there is no driver for up-to-date digital sensor and monitoring technology. From what Accenture has seen, this indicates that these companies are just not trying new things. Given that they would expect to run these low-cost plants flat out, then overlooking the best in reliability, safety and maintenance systems could compromise long-term performance, warns Clos.

In Clos’s view it is critical companies address these challenges and adopt the latest digital technologies.

KEY BENEFITS

• Decrease raw material cost
• Increase production volume
• Decrease downtime
• Decrease energy and personnel costs
• Decrease bottleneck margin
• Real time comprehensive access to asset performance information
• Enable remote operations
• Reduced waste
• Ability to optimise across the production network and supply chain
• Improve workforce safety
• Reduced risk

THE DIGITAL OPPORTUNITY

• Intelligent chemicals plant
• Asset performance management
• Operational excellence
• Cloud-based plant application architecture
• Enterprise-level security protocols
• Asset risk management
• Integrated production planning
• Effective information integration across operations and enterprise technology layers
• End-to-end financial visibility from top floor to shop floor

To find out where company priorities on the digital plant lie and how advanced industry is in its thinking in this area, ICIS and Accenture are this month asking ICIS readers to take part in a global survey on the digital plant. Results will be combined anonymously and a full report published in ICIS Chemical Business and on ICIS.com in a forthcoming issue. To take part in the survey, please go to http://bit.ly/1M1o8HI