Roadmapping
Petrochemical
Plant Performance
The policy makers of petrochemical
plants will have to address the streamlining of nearly every aspect
of their extremely complex supp chain, explains Balvant K. Godbole.
Introduction
The petroleum and refining business will face many
competitive challenges. Owing to explosion in information technology,
far superior control techniques and short life cycles, the industrial
scenario will be forced to focus on the following aspects:
1. The period required for converting R & D effort into a
commercial product is getting shorter and shorter
2. By utilising latest operational and design techniques, the
overall operating costs will have to be lowered
3. Process yields will have to be stretched to the maximum
4. Precise control over quality and manufacturing repeatability
will have to be ensured
5. Flexibility in manufacturing has to be created in order to
face market fluctuations
6. Develop a marketing strategy to withstand inherent global
competition
7. Stricter compliance will be necessary with safety, health
and
environmental regulatory requirements
8. Increased automation, diversifi- cation, stricter person-power
planning will become the keywords of future plant operation and efficiency
In this article, a broad review is attempted to draw a road map to govern
our industrial planning and future perspectives. The above aspects are
some kind of yard sticks with which we can measure the plant performance,
draw up a wish list and analyse what are the measures to be adopted
to ultimately achieve all the objectives of plant performance.
Translating R&D Efforts into Viable Commercial
Solutions
To transform Research and Development efforts into
a viable commercial product in as short a time as possible requires
exploitation of super human qualities such as intuition, motivation,
inspiration, resource generation, and delegation of authority. If these
human virtues are exploited to the fullest then surely our R & D
objectives will contribute positively towards the needs of next decade.
The managements will have to rethink all over as to how to narrow the
large gap that exists between the requirement of intellectual personpower
and its availability to meet this challenge. Our R&D expenditure
compared to developed countries is dismally low. Proper resources will
have to be generated and provided for this effort. Fortunately, we can
easily draw from the huge human resource so easily available to us in
this country. It is necessary to build a team of intellectual wizards
to give right direction and boost to our R&D efforts. This team
will have to think of a whole new generation of products that will come
into the market in the next decade or two. After all, products are products
of imagination. Imagination itself is a product of all the virtues mentioned
above. We have to remould R&D environment around us to meet these
requirements. The key requirements for excellent R&D effort are:
1. Well established laboratories
2. Excellent testing and research equipment
3. Comprehensive library and information technology facilities
4. Creation of environment in which human beings can exploit their human
talent to generate and try out new ideas
5. Top level leadership to give proper direction to the R&D efforts
6. Excellent market research to identify issues that will trigger development
of new products“Monsanto sees genomics as a key enabling technology
for dramatically increasing the speed and precision with which we can
research, develop and bring to market new products,”
cont....
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