Refined Profitability

Technology plays a vital role here and investment in Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) delivers more efficient data management, improved production execution and enhanced operational performance, enabling refiners to quickly turn data into profit.

There are three key milestones for MES, which form the pillars of profitability:
– More efficient data management (MES 1.0 – Integrating the past)
– Improved production execution (MES 2.0 – The era of work process automation)
– Enhanced performance management (MES 3.0 – Technology on the move)

MES 1.0 – Integrating the past
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) emerged in the process industries over 30 years ago. Only in the late 1970s did minicomputers become affordable enough to be successfully used in the process industries.

The earliest applications were primarily data historians (i.e. temperatures, pressure levels) in the large continuous industries, such as refining, olefins and bulk chemicals. The primary need was ‘historizing’ time-series data for trending and later analysis. Over time, refiners began to generate significant volumes of data, but struggled to leverage information effectively.

During the era of MES 1.0 other new technologies, such as planning, scheduling and advanced process control (APC), also emerged that further enhanced refinery profitability, by increasing throughput, improving product quality, reducing energy and raw material usage, as well as enhancing operational efficiency while keeping the process between safe limits of reliable operation.

Today, software such as aspenONE Advanced Process Control can scale to any control problem size and successfully applied to virtually every control issue in refining, chemicals and petrochemicals processing.

The technology improves the financial performance of the plant with benefits ranging from 3 – 5 per cent increase in capacity and 3 – 5 per cent reduction in energy usage.

Another significant technology development in the early to mid-1990s was refinery scheduling. This allowed a refiner to create a time-based schedule for either crude or unit scheduling.
Crude scheduling involved informing operations of whatever oil movements were involved in the crude oil portion of the refinery, such as offloading a ship to a specific tank, or deciding what tank should charge the crude unit.

During the 1980s and through to the economically-challenged early 1990s, an expert engineer was usually required to interface with a MES system. However, new technology has emerged in recent years that have made it much easier for casual engineers to leverage today’s MES systems. For example, greater intelligent search functionalities and business intelligence (BI), like Microsoft Suite, make it easier to find and leverage information in a MES system.

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MES 2.0 – The era of work process automation
Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, the petroleum industry began to recognise the importance of automated work processes. Simply relying on a data historian was not enough. The actual oil movements work process had many manual steps. So, to keep up with the challenges, the software developed during this time automated oil movement monitoring.

It calculated the gross volume in tanks using strapping tables based on real time estimates of tank level and qualities.

It also alerted the operator when a movement should occur, when 90 per cent of the movement had been reached, if a tank was in double movement and whether unauthorised movements were taking place. Before the movement began, it ensured that there was enough source material and sufficient room at the destination to adequately complete the movement.

Concurrently, software programmes were introduced that allowed for operations reconciliation and accounting, providing an accurate and timely account of liquid flows and inventories on a daily basis, rather than monthly, and enabling more intelligent business decisions, by giving refiners improved confidence of actual inventory positions.

Oil Accounting is a business process of measuring, validating, reconciling and publishing all the work flows on and inventories within and out of a refinery. Its practice varies widely.

Flows are normally imported from the refinery data historian and tank inventories from the tank gauging system. It boosts profitability by identifying product loss and consistently problematic instrumentation and provides decision-makers throughout the plant with critical reconciled production data.

Proper yield accounting, for example, must also take into account oil movements that occurred during a particular day (e.g. where automated oil movement software understands the amount of oil moved during a 12 a.m. to 12 a.m. period).

This information can be used in the yield accounting software to more accurately reflect the final daily inventory positions. Companies now can closely track production and take timely corrective action when deviations occur, ensuring that customer commitments are met and helping avoid purchasing components or downgrading shipments.

During the MES 2.0 timeframe, there were new MES non-work process software developed that refiners would ultimately find useful to solve important problems facing the industry.
Initially established for the batch-orientated industries, production record historian technology was developed for production segments with a defined start and end “marker”.

Using this technology, engineers were able to review past production runs much more frequently using data from many different sources visually overlaid on top of one another to speed problem analysis.

This allowed engineers the ability to quickly learn the intricacies of their production process and use the resulting knowledge to improve the process.

One great example where this technology could be applied is in refinery product blending, which has a well-defined start and stop “marker”. A refinery product blend, such as premium gasoline, must meet certain product specifications.

For example, minimum gasoline blend requirements are octane and Reid Vapor Pressure, but often there are other specifications, such as sulfur, benzene, ethanol or other requirements.

The amount of gasoline blend materials like reformate, alkylate, cat reformer gasoline, and light straight run, are usually pre-determined based on blending correlations. However, these correlations are imperfect and often assumed to work across a narrow range.

This is where production run historian software technology can provide value for refiner blend engineers by allowing them to compare and contrast past blends to improve blend correlations. The net result is using less of the higher valued materials during blending operations while still meeting product specifications.

The era of automation began to show value as refiners strived for operational excellence through improved monitoring, control and analysis of their operations. MES today enables refiners to quickly identify manufacturing performance problems, assess root causes and take corrective action.

Crucially, production execution software is tightly integrated with data historian software to improve the manufacturing process, which automatically reaps positive return on investment.

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MES 3.0 – Technology on the move
In the twenty-first century, “smart” products have provided greater communication and collaboration functionalities, facilitating quicker decision-making whilst operating on the move. Flexibility, ease of use and real-time data visualisation are significant benefits to the process industries because there are many operations-based personnel that are not desk-bound.

Business intelligence (BI) empowers employees to perform with greater flexibility as it helps improve access to manufacturing data at all organisational levels to drive quicker decisions.

Event notifications coupled with mobile analysis tools enable faster adjustments to minimise the impact of production issues. Plant managers and production engineers can use mobile BI anytime, anywhere in order to first understand an issue and take decisions faster than ever before.

Easy, digestible analysis of plant information even in remote locations helps industry leaders react to adverse changes and keep the operation performing to targets. In the past users needed to be in the control room or in front of a monitor to track and manage manufacturing performance. Now they have access to mobile visualisation tools (e.g. charts, graphs, portals, etc.).

For today’s engineers, the message is simple – mobile intelligence provides the perfect platform to achieve greater profitability. State-of-the-art mobile software enables faster decision-making and troubleshooting and displays critical, up-to-date information.

The software functionality improves employee efficiencies by simplifying routine engineering analysis tasks, such as examining and comparing process data, reducing root cause analysis time and easily finding KPI data that will enable the engineer to respond to changing process conditions.

Pillars of profitability
The bottom line is that effective production drives operational excellence enabling better and faster decisions. Software technology helps refiners achieve consistent performance across all assets.

It also defines the importance of real-time business performance management: plan, execute, monitor and respond to change immediately on all time horizons. History has shown that manufacturing execution systems have laid the foundations to help refiners across the globe strengthen their competitiveness and build upon the pillars of profitability.

In Numbers
3-5% increase in capacity and reduction in energy usage with the help of MES.

About the author
Ossama Tawfick is AspenTech’s regional senior director for the MENA region. He is leading AspenTech’s drive to expand in the Middle East region via a direct business model. Tawfick has extensive hands-on experience in the oil and gas upstream and downstream businesses coupled with strong commercial acumen and in-depth knowledge of the Middle East business culture.

He has a consistent track-record of success in business development across a wide variety of industries in Europe and the Middle East. In addition, he holds a BSc in electronics engineering and an MBA from the ESCP-EAP school of management in Paris.