Chemical Industry
Sap Digital Manufacturing (DM) For The Chemical Industry
For many chemical companies today, keeping up-to-date and leveraging the newest manufacturing IT/OT technologies must be a high priority. The thought of Industry 4.0/digital transformation of the process and integrating technology into their chemical production process may seem expensive, but also daunting.
With RTS, we start by looking at your business objectives to determine process execution gaps, overall requirements and value roadmap to accelerate achieving the objectives. We, along with your production performance Team, conduct brainstorming/blueprint sessions to develop the Digital Transformation roadmap to deliver on the objectives. Chemical manufacturing is complex, for example: recipe management, batching, blending, weighing and dispensing, traceability, packaging, all while maintaining benchmark yield levels and regulatory compliance.
For chemical manufacturers, an end-to-end SAP DM solution can be used to shift your company culture towards one of continuous improvement with actionable intelligence from AI/ML prescriptive insights. These are the initial steps to creating the “Intelligent Plant”, and when we intimately connect the intelligent plant to the enterprise business system, we foster the potential of an “Intelligent Enterprise”.
How Can SAP DM Software Optimize a Production Floor?
The production floor is one of the most critical components of a manufacturing company. It’s where the magic happens, feed raw materials turn into high quality, customer compliant finished materials. However, reactors, blenders, equipment and processes break, cycle times run longer than planned and human error is not uncommon. Without a well-oiled production floor, a company cannot continue to outperform competitors.
To stay ahead of the curve, manufacturers need a solution that will help their employees work smarter and more efficiently. That’s where an SAP DM solution comes into play.
SAP solutions provide the tools to help any manufacturing team run the production floor smoothly, and strategically, while maximizing yield and profitability. The ability to make quick, confident decisions in real time is the key to staying competitive. This is impossible with traditional spreadsheet-based systems or siloed point solution approaches.
SAP Digital Manufacturing solutions can do more for chemical manufacturing companies than traditional management approaches. It can:
• Provide real-time visibility to production.
• Foster continuous improvement and optimize your production floor.
• Identify issues or potential problems before they happen.
• Deliver a holistic production data lake for AI/ML analytics.
• Integrate easily with existing systems.
• Empower employees with the data and insights to make manufacturing smarter.
• Remove non-value-adding actions and anecdotal evidence of losses.
• Build a reputation of trust and quality with the supplier base using auditable, quality data.
There are problems that companies face industry-wide, many of which can be remedied with Manufacturing Execution Solutions (MES). Let’s look at a few of the most common issues chemical manufacturers face to determine how MES software can help.
Problem 1: Production Costs Are Rising
Chemical companies are facing undeniable global economic uncertainty. The cost of raw materials is rising, safety compliance is becoming more difficult, energy costs are increasing, production runs are smaller, along with global labor shortages.
Energy costs are a significant contributor to Opex and trending to get more expensive into the future. SAP offers “Energy Management”, as part of the MES solution delivering precise monitoring and targeting of your energy consumption with dynamic, regression set targets based on production volume. Thus, enabling it to operate with minimal energy and GHG emissions.
Every cost increase directly impacts manufacturers’ bottom line. So, what can be done?
An MES solution, fulfilling your manufacturing business objectives, can quickly and easily analyze performance and trends based on shifts, crews, individuals, raw feed materials, equipment, production lines, products, and packaging, to drive operational improvements.
SAP DM identifies opportunities for improvement when it comes to performance, product innovation as well as reasons for less than project yields. With this technology, manufacturers can analyze product costs relative to targets to better gauge overall cost and profit analysis.
With MES software, end-to-end yield tracking is more accessible. Companies can identify causes of yield, delays and labor loss from production line operations to final finishing and bulk packaging to reduce manufacturing costs. This also helps to improve the overall plan attainment.
Problem 2: Integrating Technology Comes With a Steep Learning Curve
Adopting technology can be a challenge for many companies, not everyone has the tech-savvy resources, at times the willingness to change needs to be overcome.
How are chemical manufacturers supposed to keep up with the sweeping change?
Selecting an SAP DM solution along with a seasoned 17-year SAP Partner to achieve an Intelligent Enterprise. Today, chemical manufacturers need an MES solution that can not only fit into their current processes but also improve them.
MES delivers features that help manufacturers work smarter, not harder.
The SAP DM allows companies to do the following easily:
- React to problems and implement new solutions faster.
- Drive continuous improvement company-wide.
- Measure factors like downtime, labor, plan attainment, and first pass yield in real-time.
- With SAP’s highly flexible solution companies can remove disparate band-aid solutions for a more efficient and holistic shop floor.
- Gain transparency across the company.
SAP DM provides complete role-specific views and offers multiple languages for its users. Also, there’s no coding or programming required; it’s an out-of-the-box solution.
Embracing Technology Will Ensure Survival
For most chemical organizations, there’s an existing mentality that integrating technology into business is complicated and invasive, SAP DM delivers high integration capabilities that enable to NOT “rip and replace” but migrate with the existing production shop floor landscape in a paced value add controlled fashion.
The goal of adding software to your shop floor is to increase margin by producing more via reducing production anomalies, increasing quality and reducing costs.
Adding technology to the shop floor is only as complicated as the company makes it. Start by rolling out high-value point solutions, like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), or real-time visibility to production key performance indicators, or a serialization system for genealogy to record all production parameters for each manufactured batch or lot. Once that becomes a natural part of your operation, more can be added to increase your efficiency.
Digitally Transform and Optimize Your Chemical Production
Supercharge your continuous improvement program by gaining increased visibility, proactive alerts and tighter control over your operations. Real time, high-fidelity datapoints from every part of your production operation, builds the “data lake foundation”, allowing analytics to drive accurate information supporting good business decisions for every step of production.
Easy access to this comprehensive information (you can even collaborate via MS Teams directly from SAP DM) allows you to quickly identify and annunciate manufacturing losses, measure metrics such as plan attainment and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) KPI’s to boost efficiency across the production process. Thus, accelerating continuous improvement in your facility.
Quality Control Management
Traditional methods, because of their lack of control and consistency compared to more advanced technology, leave room for mis-interpretation and human error when it comes to quality control.
How can SAP DM software help with quality control?
This technology eliminates error by:
- Real-time QA tracking from inline QA analyzers to ensure quality is met.
- SPC trending of critical parameters.
- Alerting the right team or person if something needs attention.
- Eliminating falsification, delayed data reporting and data manipulation.
- Regular checks into operator workflows to remove the reliance on human watch and check processes.
MES software is built to optimize the shop floor by providing accurate data, real-time alerts, and more transparent communication between employees and teams. Chemical manufacturers can’t afford to slip up on quality control and MES software minimizes the effort without compromising the diligence.