Real-time Enterprise Optimization in the Polymer Manufacturing Industry

A polymer manufacturer needs to be able to make profitable, proactive decisions about manufacturing that supports the business goals and incorporates the demands of the customer. To achieve this, the company must tie business and manufacturing processes together to make the best decisions. Orders and forecasts must be integrated with planning, scheduling, and plant operations. Existing technology solutions have created operational silos, which has led to a variety of point solutions that fail to link the business goals to the plant process. The key issues in the optimization the production operation are the decomposition of decision-making tasks, the modeling of options for these tasks, and the communication among the tasks. The decomposition establishes the scope for the decisions to be addressed for the planning, scheduling, and control tasks. Each decision-making task uses a model of the underlying closed-loop process to reflect the options and constraints on the decisions. In polymer production, the use of a static transition matrix neglects the options of choosing different paths for the transition. In order to leverage the flexibility in the plant operation, the decision-making tasks must have a model that describes the available options and tradeoffs for the process operation. The result is an integrated enterprise optimization solution for polymer manufacturing that allows the enterprise to adapt to different business contexts and opportunities.