Developing and Adapting Novel Ideas for Plant Upgrades

Over the life of a production facility basic economic drivers such as raw material and utility costs, required finish product specifications or desired volumes often change. The challenge in industry is to develop new ideas and/or adapt from current state-of-the -art to existing plants to meet the changing demands on the facility. This paper will examine the methodology of the upgrade project.
We will look at the development of ideas stage where we challenge our engineers to develop new ideas and or adapt from existing plants. How do we focus the technical community on the challenge of plant upgrades, where do the ideas come from and how do we incentivize them to continue feeding the pipeline of upgrade opportunities.
We will then review the adaption phase where the technical community works with the business areas to value the changes and make the decision to adapt them to the facility. Lastly we will examine the costing, planning and construction phase which requires a high level of coordination between the engineering, business and operation departments to make sure we don’t impact existing business while the improvements are being made.