Processing, December 2020

A profit driven operation While the engagement and participation of people at all levels in a company is necessary strategic planning and financial goal setting has to come from the top The challenge which few companies solve is translating management goals to the plant floor so all operators understand how their actions support or hinder these goals Using traditional methods and even many sophisticated IT based management tools there is simply no mechanism to make set points in the control room that reflect these larger goals Scenes like the one at the beginning of this article are the result KPIs for plant operators and support staff are designed to motivate desirable behavior in keeping with plant goals For example the plant reliability team has a KPI based on plant availability Team members can see hours of operation versus outages over the last several months and a bonus may be tied to attainment of a specific goal Availability is important since the plant has to run but it is not tied directly to larger financial measures This process must be rethought to find ways to connect all levels to profitability because conventional KPIs do not do the job The more useful approach is a concept called profit driven operation PDO using synaptic performance indicators SPIs which tie to specific management objectives These rather than conventional KPIs should become the basis for what drives action at all levels For example lets look at how production objectives filter through the system Figure 1 Plant managements SPI is based on gross revenue using process information management system PIMS data Engineerings SPI is based on yield and quality evaluations using PIMS data Operators SPI uses feed rate and other process variables using data from the distributed control system DCS 32 Processing DECEMBER 2020 Each production critical area has SPIs specified at all three levels Taken together for a typical chemical plant there can be several hundred SPIs in total all tying back to management objectives rather than some useful but isolated performance standard Figure 2 With PDO the effort shifts to creating an environment that makes it possible to optimize the process based on profitability and other management objectives Going back to the opening example under this approach all the people in the room can see the desired operating goal using systematically structured performance metrics rather than arbitrary individual KPIs Applying domain knowledge This kind of approach is not possible using a generic management tool that can be applied anywhere with a few configuration tweaks Creating an effective system based on SPIs is similar in many ways to building an advanced process control APC system It has to begin with a deep and thorough knowledge of the process so the appropriate levers of control and their responses can be used to deliver the desired outcomes Designing a system begins with identifying how all the process variables relate to specific management objectives This calls for drilling deeply into the first principles of the process itself and the resulting control strategy A calculation algorithm may be required to connect the variable and objective including its ideal operating range and limits Operators need guidance on how to control it from an operational standpoint With so many things happening at once the design process must Figure 1 The number of SPIs relates to the specific process and each level of person within the organization All figures courtesy of Yokogawa Figure 2 All the goals below C level must tie back to business wide corporate goals Figure 3 The aggregate goal shown at top gives an overall picture while detailed data at left indicates where individual variables are getting out of line