Chemical Supply Chain Traceability
Improve yield, throughput, safety and compliance by collecting and contextualizing data upstream, midstream and downstream
Frequently Asked Questions On Chemical Supply Chain Traceability
Recent ransomware attacks, global climate and pandemic-driven supplier issues has brought an entirely new level of visibility on the challenges, realities and vulnerabilities of petroleum and process chemical supply chains. It would not be a reach to say that the chemical industry is central to the current world economy given its impact on almost all areas. Here are a few of the frequently asked questions you should consider if you are responsible for chemical manufacturing.
How an Industry Leader in Frozen Food Manufacturing used IoT, Big Data, and Machine Learning to Increase Yield.
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What is Chemical Manufacturing?
The most common definition of chemical manufacturing is based on the transformation of organic and inorganic raw materials (i.e. oil, natural gas, air, water, metals, and minerals) by a chemical process into more than 70,000 different products. While chemicals have been made and used throughout history, the true birth of the heavy chemical industry for production of chemicals in large quantities initiated with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
What is the process behind Chemical Manufacturing?
Extensive raw material traceability plays a major role in smart manufacturing, particularly in the face of the strict regulations for emissions and safety of the chemical industry. Being able to access data on incoming materials, their movement, storage, manufacturing processes, personnel assignments, and more, provides critical details beyond whether something went wrong along the way. Now we can trace back problems to specific equipment and use diagnostic information to determine if there was a failure on that machine or with its operator.
What is supply chain management in the chemical industry?
Supply chain management can run as continuous or a batch for chemical manufacturing production. Chemical processes and various streams can merge, demerge, produce intermediate (bulk) material or completely finished goods. They can also be made-to-stock (MTS) or made-to-order (MTO) with various starting points for different material asset combinations.
What are recent renovations in chemical supply chain safety?
Chemical manufacturing planning, costing, formulation, and quality management can be complicated, since the supply chain operates under constant pressure to minimize asset downtime and maximize asset utilization. With ThinkIQ’s Transformational Intelligence platform, chemical manufacturers now have visibility for a complete overview of all operations. From raw material to finished good, our smart manufacturing technology, including our semantic model and material ledger, dramatically reduces recalls, identifies weaknesses in the plant, and eliminates safety concerns.
What are different chemical industry supply chain challenges?
Without a doubt, the challenge in the chemical industry is to digitize for both operational and strategic purposes, to increase the speed of innovation, and increase transparency through integration. New markets will be captured only if the industry meets demand with agility, manages inventory costs, customer loyalty, and optimizes capital with improved logistics planning. The next phase of chemical manufacturing is supply chain management via Industry 4.0.
Chemical manufacturers often cannot foresee the full scope and reach of their products upstream or midstream or molecules that are often only an intermediary step toward a different final product—typically produced downstream.
And it goes without saying that the chemical manufacturing industry is under constant regulatory watch due to the nature of its materials and products. This requires organizations to balance unique supply chain pressures against those demands.
What is the future of supply chain management in Chemical Manufacturing?
Statistics show that 96 percent of all manufactured goods depend on chemicals in one way or another today, and approximately 2 percent (about $226 billion) of the US GDP rides on the industry’s ability to trace, track, and manage the supply chain, incorporating state-of-the-art, tried-and-true supply chain management is the sound decision. The future of supply chain management will be the adoption of Industry 4.0 methodologies to achieve fully autonomous smart manufacturing status.
How artificial intelligence is helping chemical manufacturers define and pursue next level security and developments in the global regulatory environment.
Advances in AI and machine learning lead to predictive maintenance, automatic material planning, accurate sales and operations planning, full, on-time deliveries, and lower capital investment with greater customer satisfaction. And just as raw material intelligence and visibility via material ledger has led to significant improvements in yield (as much as double), virtual elimination of regulatory fines, and tens of millions of dollars in operational savings in the food and beverage space, similar strides can be achieved in chemical manufacturing.
The use of artificial intelligence is facilitating new levels of visibility and understanding of materials as they flow upstream, midstream and downstream across the supply chain.
How Industry 4.0 is improving manufacturing yield, safety, quality, and compliance by making sense of data in the chemical industry.
A material ledger provides a novel approach to intelligent tracking of material and energy movement and transformations, their associate monetary value, and quality data. It delivers insight that improves yield, quality, safety, compliance, and brand confidence through a fact-based granular, data-centric contextualized view of material flows and related provenance attribute data. ThinkIQ utilizes existing IoT infrastructure on which a cyber-physical system can be built to decentralize decision-making in favor of autonomous task-completion of all but the highest-level exceptions. It’s the next generation of smart manufacturing delivering insights chemical manufacturers need to improve yield, quality, safety, compliance, and brand confidence.
What is the roadmap to becoming a Smart Manufacturing firm?
With ThinkIQ’s Smart Manufacturing platform, chemical manufacturers now have visibility for a complete overview of all operations. From raw material to finished good, our smart manufacturing technology, including our semantic model and material ledger, dramatically reduces recalls, identifies weaknesses in the plant, and eliminates safety concerns.
In order to achieve Smart Manufacturing status, you will need to go through 5 levels of Industry 4.0 automation:
- Data Capture
- Visualization & Integration
- Material-Centric Insight
- Transformational Intelligence
- Industry 4.0 Smart Manufacturing
How are manufacturers increasing supply chain agility in the chemical supply chain?
Material flow analytics for the intelligent supply chain can optimize the consumption of materials and resources. Considering the importance of safety, health, and environment to the chemical value chain, ThinkIQ’s ability to trace product — from raw materials through customer delivery — and our depth of experience, including semantic model and material ledger, is transformative and delivers a revolutionary new level of agility.