Promoting Improvement Ideas in the Organization

As a technical manager or process engineer or operator, you may have already acquired some good ideas for improving your plant and process unit. However, it is not an easy feat to persuade the technical committee to consider your ideas and then proceed to accept and evenmaUy implement them. I have observed many good ideas that have died in the infancy stage because they could not pass the evaluation gates. Such failure is commonly due to a lack of techno-economic assessment and communications. Remember, it is always necessary to sell your ideas to key stakeholders. 

you need to develop technical and economic merits to build a business case. Therefore, it is imperative that you determine the benefit of your ideas, that is, what is the value to the stakeholders, in the very early stages. Next, you should identify, with the help of process specialists, what it takes to implement the idea. You need to do the necessary homework to come up with rough estimates of the capital cost required to deliver the benefit for your ideas. 

In the chapters that follow, all the essential tools will be provided in a clear, step-by-step manner together with application examples. My hope is that by applying the methods in your work—one step at a time, whether you are a manager, an engineer, or an operator—it will enable you to discover improvement ideas, to asses them, and then finally to prioritize them in a good order. Once all these boxes are checked, you will have a good chance to communicate and implement your ideas successfully within your organization. 

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