The success of industrial R&D activities has a direct impact on a company’s long-term commercial profitability. Today, a variety of market forces, including the drive for growth, the search for new ideas and innovative products, and the increasingly competitive pressures of the global economy, have made R&D activities more important than ever from a strategic perspective. The need to streamline the process of moving from industrial R&D through demonstration-scale operations to full-scale manufacturing is a basic business requirement. To develop and manufacture products in the most cost-effective way, companies need a platform that will enable the smooth and consistent transfer of the proven product designs to full-scale manufacturing plants around the globe. Applying state-of-the-art control technology and integrated information-management procedures throughout the discovery, research, process-development and optimization steps will help laboratory processes to successfully make that critical leap.... http://www.che.com/business_and_economics/project_mgmt/Making-the-Leap-from-R-and-D-to-Manufacturing_5239.html
Project management can be a messy, complex issue for all involved parties and, likely, the most hair-raising aspect of all is project handover from the EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) contractor to the chemical processor. In the past, this literally involved a truck pulling up with cartons and boxes chock full of engineering documents, drawings, operations manuals and catalogs. From there, the project owner usually took the load into a room somewhere in the facility where operations and maintenance staff would later spend countless hours searching for the particular drawing or manual they needed for a repair or other task.
In today’s fast track schedules for constructing new capital facilities, the process of designing, delivering and erecting piping often falls in the project’s critical path. This is particularly true for facilities constructed in emerging economies, where the facility generally resides in a remote location, posing significant logistical challenges. Squarely positioned in the center of the piping design, deliver and erect (DDE) process sits the subprocess of fabricating piping components into erectable sections of piping, or pipespools. The engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor’s management approach to this fabrication is key because it impacts the project team’s ability to manage the overall schedule. In fact, if handled properly, management of pipespool fabricators can get the piping DDE process off the project’s critical path altogether.... http://www.che.com/business_and_economics/project_mgmt/Active-Management-of-Pipespool-Fabricators_4446.html
Effective use of capital in the ownership and management of manufacturing assets is critical to the financial performance of companies in the chemical process industries (CPI). Many of these companies use benchmarking in compliance with applicable laws and antitrust regulations to compare, identify, and adopt industry best practices that drive the capital effectiveness of their project development and execution processes. This article presents the considerations that are fundamental to that process of using benchmarking successfully.... http://www.che.com/business_and_economics/project_mgmt/Benchmarking-for-Success_3865.html
If your estimate for a project's capital cost is too high or too low, incomplete or wrong, a poorly developed scope is the mostly likely cause. In almost all cases, project cost estimating is more accurate than the scope used to develop the estimate. (To develop a good project scope, please refer to "Get Your Scope Straight for Project Success," CE, February, pp. 36-38). Yet good scope definition is only part of the answer.... http://www.che.com/business_and_economics/project_mgmt/Making-Sense-of-Your-Project-Cost-Estimate_2805.html
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