Identifying goals
Royal DSM is a global leader in more than 60% of its markets. The company’s strategy centers on its continuing evolution toward being a nutrition, health and sustainable living company. Royal DSM and its associated companies deliver annual net sales of about €10 billion with approximately 23,000 employees and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam.
Unplanned downtime is the nemesis of a manufacturing company such as Netherlands-based Royal DSM, and it is actively engaged in lessening production losses due to unscheduled delays from instrumentation issues.
Overcoming challenges
Royal DSM knows it can achieve substantial savings by effectively managing and using engineering design, installation and as-built information, then transforming this information into a valuable strategic asset. In doing so, Royal DSM has recognized savings of 10% to 20% in specific areas by using Facets Instrumentation.
By maintaining the sole, accurate and consistent instrumentation database from Facets Instrumentation, Royal DSM lessened production losses due to fewer search and investigation activities for correct information during plant startups, thus shortening plant delays related to instrumentation problems.
Royal DSM has strong indications that the result is an accumulated operational downtime decrease of up to 3% per year, which translates into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over a plant’s lifecycle, depending on throughput, asset utilization and product margin.
Realizing results
With Facets Instrumentation, Royal DSM notes that it has a complete and accurate as-built instrumentation asset available in less than one day after a change is made. This ensures that the as-built status is always up to date for the maintenance crew in case of an upset in the plant shortly after the change.
This benefit is also crucial with respect to the company’s license to operate. In the event of an incident, authorities require companies to demonstrate that the as-built status fulfilled legislative requirements at that particular moment. For example, within 24 hours of an incident at one plant, Royal DSM was able to generate a CD with the as-built situation, in case of any future inquiry.
In one of its pharmaceutical plants, engineers also learned that the Facets Instrumentation package better supports validation activities than conventional engineering does.
