The economics of chemical manufacturing usually favor production in fewer but larger plants rather than in many smaller ones. Larger facilities require larger organizations and multiple-discipline teams to run effectively. This ratchets up the importance of effective workflows for handing off and reviewing elements of projects. Over-the-fence engineering where work is done in silos with no knowledge or consideration of the actual plant objective can create difficulties. One key contributor to problems are specialists who don’t grasp the full impact of their changes. Another common culprit is a rushed workflow that lacks sufficient time for review and verification of the correctness of steps. Every job has a “right” schedule for going from idea to implementation. To understand this better, we must look at the overall procedure used to get from an idea to an implementation.
The idea may range from building a completely new plant to making a modest modification to a current facility. Here, we’ll focus on smaller changes, i.e., repairs or replacements to an existing plant. Even minor modifications can involve extensive lead time. Figure 1 summarizes the general workflow for making a change from inception of the project to final implementation and review of how well it worked out. I think four points deserve emphasis.
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