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Safripol, Sasolburg,
South Africa
Safripol is a leading plastic manufacturer in South Africa. Safripol can produce 120,000mt/year of polypropylene (PP), utilizing LyondellBasell's Spheripol technology and also produces 160,000mt/year of high density polyethylene (HDPE). PP and HDPE are used for plastic components and products, from food wrapping to automotive parts.
The polypropylene plant uses Yokogawa's CENTUM CS for more than 15 years without any major problems, including the following environments.
Safripol started the migration process to CENTUM CS 3000 in 2007 and CENTUM VP will be installed by the end of this year.
Due to Global competition Safripol is striving for high efficient plant operation. Safripol is also improving the quality of the product by PDCA method for further sustainable manufacturing. The following issues were raised in the production department and the challenges were addressed.
The existing grade change procedure takes 2.5hours and the overview of the procedure is shown below. Safripol configured this procedure into Yokogawa's Exapilot.
Due to the natural differences between individuals, each operator will do the same job differently, although manual standard operating procedures are available. Although the operators did their best, issues were raised regarding the consistency of the operations during grade changes.
By using Yokogawa's Exapilot, Safripol were able to eliminate product variations and kept the operations consistent, thereby reducing operational costs drastically by eliminating " off spec" products during transitions.
Safripol also uses Exapilot in order to facilitate operator training regarding grade changes - The available modes allow the new employees to run a procedure without influencing the plant.
Exapilot also allows the assessment of procedures to ensure flawless execution.
An Exapilot report is available in order to give a step by step report of every action taken, in order to track the procedure from start to end.
Here are some comments from the operators:
And finally, the Process Information Engineer commented about Exapilot as follows.
Final product Xylene Soluble content
measured by NMR – Before Exapilot
Difficult to coordinate two contradicting process settings during grade change (C2 increase vs Donor increase) Poor consistency
Final product Xylene Soluble content
measured by NMR – After Exapilot
Excellent coordination and repetitiveness facilitated by Exapilot
Procedural Automation (Exapilot) provides a flexible methodology to capture, optimize and retain procedural knowledge in a process plant while meeting requirements in reliability, flexibility, and lifecycle costs.
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