Current Challenges of Production in the Chemical Industry

The consumer is increasingly aware and concerned about the origin of every chemical compound, but in addition, regulatory bodies are increasingly pressing for compliance with quality, traceability, safety, and environmental regulations. Any breach of the regulations by the industry can have a significant impact on the credibility, brand confidence and, of course, on the bottom line.

But this is not the only challenge for the chemical industry, globalization has been a great opportunity to grow and penetrate new markets, however, it is also being forced to overcome new barriers. With more players in the market, the chemical industry, mainly the basic and secondary chemical industry, needs to be continuously improving its competitiveness and researching new ways to spend more time producing and saving costs, such as energy costs.

Marrying the new production audit policies with the improvement of competitiveness is not a simple challenge. This has meant that not only can production not stop, but the other supervision tools cannot fail.

As is happening in other sectors, in the chemical industry there is a tendency to establish new processes and ways of working jointly in the IT and OT departments, which is forcing the generation of new personnel structures, rethinking of operations teams, and collaboration between maintenance personnel. In this sense, predictive maintenance will greatly enable this change.

In this difficult context, digitalization and the technological evolution that this entails plays a relevant role as an enabling and facilitating element of change. With this, it is expected that the following problems can be addressed:

• Interaction between assets and systems: in chemical factories, equipment that is more than 10 years old coexists with the IoT sensorization initiatives that are being deployed. This means that it will be necessary to be able to interact with all these equipment and serve this information in a standard way to the higher systems.
• Fast Recovery: currently, the chemical industry does not have many tools that allow it to recover quickly in the event of equipment failure if something more than a replacement or spare part is necessary. If the failure in question comes from a server – which should not go to zero, or from a PLC, being able to certify and ensure the state prior to the failure becomes a real problem.
• Plant communications: in line with the above, communication failures are not usually resolved with a replacement. Being able to strengthen, supervise, diagnose and prevent problems in industrial networks in an agile way becomes imperative. This point is especially important in critical networks where there are field buses.
• Evolution of CMMS/APM: classic CMMS and APM software are falling short of functionalities. Not only should they incorporate easy-to-use predictive maintenance calculation methods, but they should also be able to communicate and coordinate with production software in a simple way. As mentioned above, this point will become increasingly important.
• Document management and local supervision: when starting to manage a significant amount of data locally within the factory, it is recommended that the work teams closest to production, both operations and maintenance, also begin to have their own tools for generating their own reports or displaying indicators. Obviously, there is a capable tool at the factory level capable of generating large KPIs, but these are usually more focused on global and business data, which are not the most useful for these teams.

Be that as it may, the chemical industry is not unprepared. Year after year, it makes significant efforts in continuous improvement. And the experience says that, to solve regulatory challenges without losing competitiveness, it is necessary to have not only advanced tools, but also trusted partners.

If you want to obtain more information about Logitek, or about our solutions focused on the chemical industry, do not hesitate to attend the Meet&Talk Wonderworld Congress 2019 or contact our specialists.