Four benefits energy & chemical plants receive from integrating their production processes  

Owner-operators of existing energy and chemical plants must grapple with three disruptive megatrends: stiff emissions reduction targets, steady 2% annual global energy consumption growth and ultra-volatile commodity markets.

To successfully navigate these challenges while increasing production and profits, plant owner-operators must integrate their production processes. By incorporating advanced cloud-based digital technologies, your engineering and production teams will gain end-to-end visibility into your plant’s production processes while being empowered with data-driven insights that enable continuous improvements in planning, scheduling, quality and efficiency. Read on to discover four reasons why you should make the connected digital plant a reality.

1. Solving quality and operations management faults becomes much easier

Chemical manufacturing plants are under pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency while maintaining high product quality. By adopting digital technologies like manufacturing operations management (MOM) solutions, your plant’s engineering and production specialists will gain complete visibility, control and the ability to optimize manufacturing production and processes across your enterprise.

Solve quality and operations management issues quickly by connecting your plant’s automation systems and with a digital twin (virtual replica) of your plant. The digital twin provides decision-makers with data-driven insights through simulating products, people, processes and resources virtually before implementation on your manufacturing floor.

2. Operations management systems enable continuous plant improvement

To thrive in today’s unpredictable economy, power plant owner-operators must deliver innovative products faster while reducing their plant’s energy consumption and emissions. Adopting digital tools such as manufacturing execution and operations management systems eliminates power plant data silos by integrating your ERP, manufacturing, and production systems to enable a comprehensive digital thread across workflows. The solution consolidates all production processes, resulting in a connected digital plant that optimizes operations in real-time and provides continuous improvement opportunities.

3. Digital manufacturing solutions are improving chemical industry sustainability

Whether it’s for reducing health-related impacts or accelerating decarbonization, the chemical industry has gone all-in on sustainability. Environment-minded chemical companies are incorporating digital manufacturing tools like MOM, supply chain management (SCM) and formulated product design (FPD) to:

• Ensure new initiatives enable high operational efficiency and superior product quality
• Simulate design changes before introducing them in production
• Reduce the environmental impact of suppliers and customers
• Design and deploy eco-friendly formulas with reduced environmental impacts
• Improve chemical plant sustainability without cutting into financial gains

4. Chemical makers can better navigate fast-changing trends with digitalization

Chemical companies must navigate a rapidly transforming consumer marketplace and regulatory environment. To remain profitable, manufacturers must improve operational efficiency through digitalization. Today’s advanced digital manufacturing solutions help businesses automate plant processes to dramatically improve efficiency and shorten time-to-market. Leading chemical manufacturers like BASF have integrated their top floor and shop floor to ensure high product quality while achieving 5% – 10% reduction in batch production time. 

Make your connected digital plant a reality

Ensuring sales orders are accurately captured and mapped to your manufacturing and production processes could be difficult. Your workers might struggle to give upper management real-time production order updates. Or it could be challenging to complete production process steps at the right time, in the right sequence, while meeting compliance requirements.

In any of these scenarios, digitally integrating your production operations is the best solution. Click here to discover how our digital solutions can help your plant achieve operational excellence.