This blog is the second blog in the PSC Best Practices Blog Series. Patrick explains how advanced planning technology and best practices can help 'weather the storm' of the volatile energy industry.

This blog is this first of the PSC Best Practices Blog Series, it introduces the importance of planning and scheduling and how difficult it can be to come up with the best decision.

The infrastructure supporting manufacturing operations in bulk chemicals has become pretty robust. The plants tend to be well instrumented and monitored. Sure, there are improvements to be made but when you compare the infrastructure prevalent in continuous plants with that of batch plants, you might find a pretty substantial gap.

Effective KPIs and KPI hierarchies are one of 6 Keys to Improving Operational Effectiveness. A properly designed hierarchy of KPIs, aligned throughout the layers of the organization, will ensure that performance of lower level KPIs will produce corresponding improvements in the highest level KPIs.

Quick action shortens the duration of a production problem and yet few companies’ measure and track the response times of their organization.

Overview and demo from AT experts on Smart Tune- an enhanced optimization algorithm that simplifies the tuning and configuration workflow. Smart Tune allows users to directly specify objectives rather than enduring the complicated tuning process.

Adaptive Process Control is primarily recognized for streamlining APC maintenance, however it is also very useful in new controller development. Eni shares their story on how they used Adaptive Process Control to build new APC applications faster and more efficiently than traditional methods, allowing them to achieve stable behavior in the presence of large model mismatch. "Seed" models were used to rapidly deploy controllers and accrue benefits immediately, all while minimizing disruption to operations.

John Campbell (AspenTech) shares how to use seed models (less than perfect models based on historical data or similar processes) to shorten the time before a controller is turned on to accrue benefits earlier and potentially develop multiple controllers at once (in parallel).

The process industry’s big data problem is the need to support the interlocked decisions that drive profitability.  Links to short video on data management for Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM).

This article published in Business Standard [India], by Sunil Patel and Ron Beck, describes how E&Cs can gain a competitive advantage, achieving lower design costs (CAPEX) for clients through modular design; and using aspenONE engineering for design templates.