Lyondell Chemical Company is a global enterprise specialising in the production of basic chemicals and derivatives that are the building blocks for everyday products, such as clothing, food packaging, building materials, household furnishings and automobile parts.

With approximately 7750 employees worldwide and more than US$12billion in assets under management, the enterprise includes Lyondell's Intermediate Chemicals & Derivatives segment, and joint ventures Equistar Chemicals, LP and Lyondell-CITGO Refining, LP. Even in a challenging economic environment the company continues to make progress by focusing on financial responsibility, operational excellence and the quality and capability of its work force. Technology plays an important role at Lyondell. Its newest facility in The Netherlands - known as the Maasvlakte Plant - is the most technologically advanced propylene oxide plant in the world, according to the company.
David Chapman, who as director of Business Solutions, has global responsibility for IT applications for all Lyondell business lines (excluding Lyondell-CITGO Refining, LP), stresses technology's importance to his company. He has been with Lyondell for more than 22 years, serving in a variety of facilities, business process improvement and IT roles.
Commenting on Lyondell's long-term IT vision for the plant engineering information area, Chapman says: "We want to enable our employees and partners to make better business decisions at the right time, at the right place and with the right information. Enabling technologies are necessary to generate that decision information. With respect to the plant engineering information area, our key objectives are much like every large-scale chemical manufacturing plant or refinery - reliability, safety, environmental compliance and product quality - all at a continually reduced cost of operations."
According to Chapman, Lyondell believes that a key component is 'asset intimacy'. In practical terms this means that within the plant the organisation must understand its equipment from the very beginning of the lifecycle when a plant or unit is designed, through to its installation, operation and decommissioning.
"The better you understand the equipment and its performance, the better you can predict any potential failure to perform. You can also correct that in a planned way before it becomes a reliability issue - and at a much lower cost than dealing with it reactively," Chapman says.
There are many ways to support this approach, according to Chapman, including the Intergraph Process Power and Offshore software that Lyondell uses. This includes intelligent design tools that allow design data to be stored and accessed throughout the life of any plant. Lyondell's SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) system is another support tool, because it stores equipment procurement and maintenance information.
"We are also pursuing the SmartPlant Foundation (engineering database) from Intergraph, because we see opportunities to pull together event data with design data from the Intergraph suite - including the instrumentation, plant and electrical design information generated by tools in that family, as well as other sources," Chapman explains. "Having this information available and broadly visible to the organisation allows our people to make better decisions. That relates directly to reliability and costs. It has a very strong relationship to safety, because many safety issues come during a variance to normal operations."
Lyondell is not only passing more and more data internally among the maintenance, operations and engineering groups, but also to a wide variety of outside engineering partners and suppliers. In doing so, it is following a growing industry trend.
Here, engineering software such as Intergraph's helps Lyondell because it has been developed for use by both owner operators and engineering firms alike, according to Chapman.
Rolling out its IT strategy, the company is now implementing and plans to use intelligent P&IDs (process and instrumentation diagrams) during plant operations.

Greenfield site provides IT opportunity

The timing was opportunistic because of its Netherlands greenfield Maasvlakte site. "Greenfield sites don't happen very often," Chapman says. "We asked ourselves, 'Since we're building the plant, how can we set up the processes and technology to our best advantage for this new facility?"
Part of that process has been to use an intelligent P&ID application (Intergraph's SmartPlant P&ID) to electronically capture and maintain the information for the new site - developing an intimate knowledge of the plant from the outset.
The speed at which information is accessed is the primary goal. One issue for Lyondell (as for the industry as a whole) is the changing operations work force. An increasing percentage of the operators in the chemical industry are nearing retirement age. With intelligent P&IDs, operators who may have less history with a facility can electronically mine data quickly.
"We won't have to rely on what is in one employee's head," Chapman says. "If it is digital and visible, it can be in the head of any person who needs that information quickly to make the right decisions."
Lyondell intends to carry the policy over into brownfield sites. One reason for selecting a new facility for intelligent P&ID implementation is that the company did not have some of the barriers to entry that it might have at existing plants, such as data conversion. "The more we can reduce those upfront costs, the easier it is to accelerate an implementation to our other sites," Chapman explains. "As the Maasvlakte Plant begins to put this concept into practice, we are seeing how it performs, and we are learning from it. We expect it to be successful, and we expect to extend it to other sites."
He continues: "Our beliefs centre on asset intimacy, and solutions such as the Intergraph suite fill a gap in our asset knowledge," Chapman says. "As our new plant comes online, we will watch performance to assess our business case. The Intergraph ROI itself is an estimated US$400000 worth of savings. The ROI case is built around tangible benefits, not immeasurable ones that lead many people to be sceptical."
He continues: "The biggest potential savings will come from what we do with the information. This is where change management comes in. If you can change the behaviour of an organisation, the benefits are going to dwarf anything that is in the ROI calculation."

For more information, visit www.lyondell.com or www.ppo.intergraph.com