By switch­ing to a new way of work­ing, a petro­chem­i­cals pro­duc­er increased pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty by 7% and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by 24% — while keep­ing costs down

Back­ground

The petro­chem­i­cal indus­try is a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to the glob­al econ­o­my. Petro­chem­i­cals are the build­ing blocks for many of the prod­ucts we use every day, includ­ing plas­tics, syn­thet­ic fibres, rub­ber, and med­i­cines. With­out petro­chem­i­cals, many of these prod­ucts would not exist, or they would be more expen­sive and less effi­cient to produce.

Our client is a lead­ing pro­duc­er of PET sheet and resin, man­u­fac­tur­ing pack­ing and bot­tle grade mate­ri­als with large-scale pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties in the Mid­dle East. They devel­oped inno­v­a­tive PET-related prod­ucts that are chal­leng­ing the tra­di­tion­al mar­kets for polypropy­lene, poly­styrene, and PVC in terms of performance.

These prod­ucts are also ful­ly recy­clable, and the client has devel­oped process­es where­by feed­stock in part is made up of recy­cling material.

The increase in demand for this prod­uct has left the com­pa­ny capac­i­ty con­strained. As a result, man­age­ment sought to improve cur­rent oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy before addi­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty came online at a lat­er time. This required a reliability-centred main­te­nance pro­gramme to improve equip­ment reli­a­bil­i­ty and sup­port pro­duc­tion that could meet the increased demand.

Analy­sis

The three-week analy­sis phase involved detailed main­te­nance and oper­a­tions stud­ies. We want­ed to assess what improve­ments could be made to cur­rent process­es to deliv­er the tar­get­ed benefits.

The analy­sis includ­ed obser­va­tion­al stud­ies, data reviews, SMED (Sin­gle Minute Exchange of Dye), Ratio Delays, OEE, debot­tle­neck­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, among oth­ers. The analy­sis con­clud­ed with senior man­age­ment align­ment, a project road map, a gov­er­nance mod­el and detailed man­age­ment action teams (MATs) designed to deliv­er the ben­e­fits at pace.

Based on the analy­sis, we dis­cov­ered that we could sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve prod­uct changeovers, machine ramp-up and sta­bil­i­sa­tion times using SMED (Sin­gle Minute Exchange of Dye) tech­niques to dri­ve new stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures for operators.

Project Approach

We estab­lished a steer­ing com­mit­tee (con­sist­ing of senior site man­age­ment) as well as MATs to fos­ter own­er­ship of the required changes. MATs met week­ly to assess progress and agree on reme­di­al actions. A full-time task force (con­sist­ing of client staff and sup­port­ed by our con­sul­tants) was respon­si­ble for ensur­ing prop­er knowl­edge trans­fer of the change man­age­ment tech­niques and the ade­quate resourc­ing of the change pro­gramme itself.

The project itself would cov­er two main workstreams: