Achieving Excellence in Production

Markus Aschauer, Christophe Bedier, Robert Berendes, Jens Cuntze, Heiner Frankemolle, and Thomas Rothel 

Effident management of plant operations has been a key task since the earhest days of the chemical industry. However, the commoditization of an increasing number of the industry s products in the past decades and the resulting relentless price/cost pressure has made it a matter of urgency for firms to accelerate the process of improving their production and maintenance operations. 

Nevertheless, top managers often tend to give operational excellence a low priority. This has led to a situation where the average level of performance improvement over the last 15 years has been, on average, only sufficient to compensate for the industry s price/cost squeeze. 

In the past two decades, chemical companies in all segments of the industry have launched significant efforts to improve their production functions. The main target areas have been labor and asset productivity, and improvements here have been achieved by removing bottlenecks, expanding capacity, and building up process and product quality. 

Overall performance has undoubtedly seen major improvements. Nevertheless, productivity has increased less in the chemical industry than in others it seems, therefore, that substantial opportunities must still exist for most companies. In Europe and the USA, for instance, the annual improvements in chemicals ranged from 2.9 to 3.4 percent, whereas the figures for the steel industry ranged from 3 to 4 percent, for aluminum from 4 to 5 percent, and for automotive companies from 5 to 7 percent. 

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The quest to achieve excellence in products and services should be every company s mission, which can only be achieved with a vision to implement a documented quality system based on a globally accepted standard (to overcome economic barriers). Compliance to global international standard ISO 9001 2000 will lead your company to ... 

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