Operational excellence challenges

Besides a financial performance dialogue, specialty chemicals conglomerates also need to establish an operational performance dialogue. The corporate center can help drive operational excellence by challenging and coaching the individual business units, setting benchmarks, and fostering know-how transfer between the units. 

Remanufacturing companies especially small- and medium-sized face problems to achieve adequate economy of scale of their operations and an operational excellence (Golinska and Nowak 2015). This paper presents the overview of the literature analysis on remanufacturing process challenges. The results of the pilot surveys in Polish SMEs that are involved in automotive component remanufacturing are presented. The paper consists of five sections. In Sect. 2, the theoretical background is presented. In Sect. 3, the authors discuss the research methodology. The survey results are presented in Sect. 4. Final conclusions are stated in Sect. 5. 

The study and practice of chemistry and chemical engineering will continue to be excellent preparations for a variety of operational, management, and research assignments in the modern corporation. And the beauty of it is that it is exciting, challenging, and rewarding work. In many ways I wish that I myself was just beginning. 

Acyclic stereocontrol remains a challenging problem in synthesis. While enan-tiomerically pure sulfoxides are valuable synthetic intermediates for enantiocon-trolled carbon-carbon bond formation by conjugate addition in cyclic cases, their usefulness for such alkylations in acyclic cases has not been firmly established. Moreover, most sulfoxide directed alkylation protocols utilize the valuable sulfur auxiliary just once, which limits the synthetic versatility of the process. Marino et al. have recently reported SN2 displacements of acyclic allylic mesyloxy vinyl sulfoxides with organocopper reagents (Scheme 10).33 In addition to the excellent observed stereoselectivities, the newly created chiral center is adjacent to a vinyl sulfoxide which should allow for subsequent chirality transfer operations. On treatment with organocopper nucleophiles, both sulfoxide diastereoisomers 40b and 43b underwent SN2 displacements with high Z selectivity to yield products 42b and 45b, respectively (Table 2). The oxidation state on the sulfur was varied... 

One of the challenging aspects of distillation column control is the many limitations imposed on the operation of the column. There are hydraulic constraints, separation constraints, heat-transfer constraints, pressure constraints, and temperature constraints. We recommend the excellent books by Kister (1992 and 1990) on distillation design and operation. 

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