Achieving excellence in highly regulated markets
Compliance, safety, and reliability are three foundational pillars of the chemical industry worldwide. To be successful, any producer must excel in each area to meet the required standards of a heavily regulated market. These factors ensure cost-effectiveness and efficiency in production while ensuring worker and public safety, protecting the environment, and preventing harm from hazardous substances.
However, chemical processing can be a complex and challenging environment, particularly when managing operational assets. Maintenance teams must keep equipment such as batch reactors, distillation columns, storage tanks, pumps, compressors, and piping systems in optimal condition to ensure safety, uptime, and efficiency. Meanwhile, such equipment must also cope with exposure to harsh substances and high temperatures that can lead to corrosion and accelerated wear.
The worrying cost of unplanned downtime
These factors weigh heavily on the minds of engineers within the maintenance teams of chemical processing environments. Unplanned downtime can be expensive, resulting in lost production, quality issues, and loss of customer confidence. The cost of downtime can escalate quickly and significantly impact revenues and profitability.
Indeed, according to ABB’s recently published ‘Value of Reliability’ survey, more than two-thirds of industrial businesses experience unplanned outages at least once a month, costing the typical business close to $125,000 per hour. The figure is likely to be far higher in the chemicals industry, which tends to have more complex facilities and safety-critical processes using highly specialized equipment and materials. In short, chemical companies must do everything possible to prevent such damaging situations.
The power of digitalization and collaboration
So, set against this context, how can chemical companies juggle these multifarious challenges to ensure compliance, safety, and reliability? The answer comes in the form of collaboration and digitalization. Compared to other industries, the chemicals sector has a relatively high maturity level for adopting advanced technologies such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software, which is used to optimize the maintenance and repair of equipment and processing lines. The industry is also highly collaborative, as manufacturers often have a non-adversarial relationship as they process different chemicals for different markets. Working groups, therefore, establish best practice approaches to deploying digital technologies to address physical asset support to ensure safety and compliance across the sector.
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Frequently Asked Questions
IFS Ultimo transforms compliance, making it a seamless part of your operations by offering asset tracking, automated reporting, and easy integration with your existing systems to ensure you stay ahead of regulations. With IFS Ultimo, compliance becomes less about checking boxes and more about driving operational excellence.
IFS Ultimo offers clarity about your assets, in terms of hierarchy, relation and location. By registering all relevant information about your assets, you build towards a greater understanding of your assets, which will bring you the insight needed to take well-informed decisions to extend their longevity and improve their availability.
IFS Ultimo reduces downtime by enabling proactive maintenance, employing real-time monitoring and predictive analytics to monitor potential issues before they cause disruptions. Ultimo empowers collaboration and enhances asset lifecycle management, leading to more efficient use of resources and less overall downtime.
