Chemical manufacturers face many complex challenges in production scheduling.  Whether it’s due to specialized equipment needs, material storage requirements or changing customer demands, just achieving baseline metrics is enough to keep many schedulers busy.  With the right tools, however, organizations can shift focus from meeting the minimum to going above and beyond.  AspenTech customers Dow and Croda have recently implemented Aspen Plant Scheduler™ and Aspen Schedule Explorer™, resulting in substantial improvements to their metrics.  Both companies, who have seen a significant increase in throughput at their sites using the Aspen scheduling tools, spoke on how they were able to achieve these successes.

Enabling Increased Batch Production for Dow

Through the implementation of Aspen Plant Scheduler and Aspen Schedule Explorer, multiple Dow sites increased throughput by up to 20% without spending any money on capital expenditures.  They did so by scheduling more efficiently and improving communication and collaboration amongst their team. 

They have a complex production process, with hundreds of different materials that need to be treated differently—some need to be heated prior to production, others need to be frozen after production—as well as multiple production units and packaging lines that are shared between units.  And, of course, they needed to be able to deliver products to their customers in the right quantities at the right time.  Before implementing AspenTech’s scheduling solutions, Dow had found through experience that they could only commit to producing a certain number of batches per day.  The lack of a visual granular version of the schedule made it difficult to determine where they had excess production capacity, which limited how efficiently they could run their plants.

Since Dow began using Aspen Plant Scheduler, the schedulers can now easily see when production on a given batch is expected to start or end. They can then share this information with a wider audience with the click of a button. 

Users of the software at Dow include the production schedulers, raw materials schedulers, sample coordinators, run plant engineers, operators, production data analysts, logistics, quality, tech center and safety teams.  Giving the wider team visibility to the schedule has been pivotal for this site.  “Aspen Schedule Explorer has improved collaboration and trust across the functions,” according to Miriam Kuijper, Integrated Supply Chain Improvement Manager at Dow.  “In previous methods that we used, not everyone had consistent access to the latest production schedule.  Now that we do, communication is smoother and understanding of the work processes across the functions has significantly increased.” 

This collaboration, along with the improved visibility of the schedule, has allowed this Dow site to increase the number of batches they produce.  They no longer need to adhere to the old paradigm of how many batches they can produce per day and have accordingly increased production.

Increasing Customer Focus and Service at Croda

At its site in Campinas Brazil, Croda has increased its overall Net Promoter Score by 49%, the highest of all its sites globally. Additionally, the site achieved an improvement in “on-time orders” to customers, from 80-85% to over 90%, as well as an increase in throughput of 20%. Ordinarily, Croda looked ahead one month, but since using AspenTech’s solutions, they have expanded their accuracy and visibility up to six months into the future.  They’ve also used Aspen Plant Scheduler’s optimization logic to further improve their schedule.  Previously, they relied on the production planner’s knowledge which, while valuable, sometimes led to missed opportunities because they’re unable to consider all the data and variables that Aspen Plant Scheduler is capable of.  Additionally, before Aspen Plant Scheduler, they didn’t schedule the packaging lines, leading to bottlenecks.  Now, they schedule all assets holistically and all that information is integrated with the rest of the schedule, improving visibility.

These improvements are shared with the rest of the team during the daily production meeting and through Aspen Schedule Explorer.  Having access to the latest schedule allows the production team at the plant to execute the schedule.  Since implementing the AspenTech scheduling solutions, Croda has introduced a new KPI—schedule adherence.  This metric compares how long it took to produce a given series of batches to how long the schedule planned for those batches to take.  Maintaining high marks for this KPI requires close alignment between the schedulers and the rest of the team, a task Aspen Schedule Explorer is designed to enable.  According to Caludio Souza, Shift Leader for Croda, “With the arrival of AspenTech solutions, we now see our production process more clearly, we have improved the alignment of information between areas, and we have a better balance of the workload with goals that are more compatible with our reality.”

The data processing and visualization capabilities of Aspen Plant Scheduler along with the communication and collaboration capabilities of Aspen Schedule Explorer are a powerful combination that allows manufacturers to create better schedules and execute them, leading to better efficiency, lower costs, higher throughput and improved customer satisfaction.  Since implementing these solutions, Dow and Croda have seen significant step changes for the better in their metrics.  They’ve been able to change their production scheduling paradigms to look at their processes more holistically, rather than sticking to old methods and assumptions.  While those methods and assumptions used to be necessary, they limited how efficient these companies could be in their production.  Now that they are free of those constraints, they have proven how much more potential was hidden in their manufacturing process.