Performance Materials Dashboard
When I began working at Air Products' Los Angeles Epoxy plant, the Stable Operations efforts involved an engineer having to go through paper process orders, record desired data points into Microsoft Excel, trend that data, and then look for opportunities to improve consistency or reduce cycle times. This process often took over a week to complete just one of our 200 products. With the batch controller effort, we had developed a data base populated with step-by-step product cycle times, but no good way of accessing that information. I worked with a team of engineers to develop a Stable Operations dashboard, which reports this data in useful plots & graphs to make identifying opportunities for improvement an effortless process. The Performance Materials Division (PMD) is planning to implement our dashboard in chemical plants around the world.
The Gap? It is incredibly time consuming to collect and analyze cycle time data in a batch plant that produces over 200 different products.
The Solution? Implementing automated time-accounting features has created a database containing the desired information. We are producing a new dashboard to make analyzing this data almost effortless, so that engineers can spend more time tackling problems and thinking of innovative new ideas, rather than tediously collecting and analyzing data. |
The images below show some examples of the data displays that we made available to the Performance Materials team on the dashboard.
Future Work
The website was still in the process of being built and designed when I left my position at Air Products. Future plans for the dashboard involved creating graphs that would plot real-time process data against the average and 95% confidence interval.
Dashboard Impact
This dashboard is going to enable production and process engineers around the globe to spend less time collecting data and more time actually engineering new work practices, control strategies, and other means for improving plant efficiencies and operator experiences in Air Products' chemical plants.