Unlock­ing the Poten­tial of Oper­a­tional Excel­lence in the Poly­ester Industry

BACKGROUND

Our Client is a chemical-textile indus­tri­al com­plex that pro­duces puri­fied tereph­thal­ic acid (PTA), poly­ester, resin poly­mers and fil­a­ments for PET pack­ag­ing. With a pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty of 700,000 tons per year, the com­pa­ny sup­plies a sig­nif­i­cant part of the poly­ester chain in South America.

THE CHALLENGE & ANALYSIS

Renoir was invit­ed to analyse process­es and the man­age­ment con­trol sys­tem of the company’s Main­te­nance, Logis­tics and Pro­cure­ment areas to under­stand the cur­rent lev­els of oper­a­tional per­for­mance relat­ing to costs and output.

The analy­sis iden­ti­fied oppor­tu­ni­ties relat­ing to:

1. Improv­ing labor productivity.
2. The exis­tence of and adher­ence to man­age­ment pro­ce­dures and how cur­rent process­es could be improved to increase efficiency.
3. Review­ing and reduc­ing costs of con­tracts with suppliers.
4. The main­te­nance organ­i­sa­tion in com­par­i­son with world-class standards.
5. Stan­dar­d­is­ing the main­te­nance man­age­ment sys­tem across all pro­duc­tion units and estab­lish­ing a com­mon set of KPIs.

PROJECT APPROACH

The improve­ment project last­ing 59 weeks began in the areas of Main­te­nance, Inter­nal and Exter­nal Logis­tics and Pro­cure­ment, with the Tex­tur­ing area added to the scope after 26 weeks.

Nine man­age­ment action teams (MATs) were set up to devel­op solu­tions and dri­ve to the imple­men­ta­tion of the changes. MAT mem­bers con­duct­ed train­ing, under­took data analy­sis and struc­tured the data col­lect­ed in the field, with each MAT con­sist­ing of one com­pa­ny employ­ee and one Renoir con­sul­tant. MATs were set up for Inter­nal Logis­tics, Exter­nal Logis­tics, Pro­cure­ment, Main­te­nance, PTA Plant Reli­a­bil­i­ty, HSE, Engi­neer and the Tex­tur­ing Plant (two MATs).

Every two weeks, each MAT pre­pared mate­ri­als for their respec­tive areas to present progress to the Steer­ing Com­mit­tee con­sist­ing of senior man­age­ment. Imple­ment­ed improve­ments were mea­sured against set per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy met­rics and linked to the finan­cial impacts gen­er­at­ed, align­ing with the strate­gic goals of the company.

IMPLEMENTATION

The first 10 weeks fol­lowed the Renoir Focus Process®, which has been devel­oped specif­i­cal­ly to fos­ter own­er­ship and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the client’s team mem­bers, process­es that had low effi­cien­cy were revised, new per­for­mance indi­ca­tors were agreed, and the entire exe­cu­tion team was trained in how to suc­cess­ful­ly imple­ment per­for­mance improvements.

This process allowed a wider group of indi­vid­u­als to under­stand the scale of the oppor­tu­ni­ty and par­tic­i­pate in defin­ing the changes required; this in turn allowed them to com­mit to the pro­gram’s targets.

The agreed changes were imple­ment­ed. In the area of main­te­nance, changes to processes/systems allowed the func­tion to bet­ter plan and man­age their dai­ly activ­i­ties, there­by reduc­ing break-ins, reduc­ing back­logs and improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Bet­ter use of key main­te­nance method­olo­gies (such as fail­ure modes analy­sis for crit­i­cal equip­ment) led to the improve­ment in OEE.

These improve­ments were sup­port­ed by oth­ers in the pro­cure­ment and logis­tics areas. The con­tract­ing mod­el for parts, mate­ri­als and ser­vices were reviewed; rene­go­ti­a­tion, imple­men­ta­tion of SLAs, review of min/max stock lev­els and lead times all ensured that costs were reduced with­out neg­a­tive­ly affect­ing the main­te­nance function’s abil­i­ty to achieve the required lev­els of avail­abil­i­ty and reliability.

KEY RESULTS