| Management of Change Puts The Pieces Together  From products to safety, managing change in process or plant brings people and technology together for safe and efficient plant operation.
"People don't have a natural instinct for the appreciation of change management that they should," says Bill Wray. "It's unfortunate, but sometimes it takes a tragedy to wake people up to doing the right thing." Wray, a registered Professional Engineer, works at a Bayer MaterialScience LLC polyethers plant in Channelview, Texas. His title is engineering consultant, but he actually does most of the engineering tasks at the plant.
The Bayer plant was previously owned by LyondellBasell Industries and is located in the midst of the larger LyondellBasell facility. It’s operated under contract by Lyondell. Although the name says Bayer, polyethers, not pharmaceuticals, are the plant’s product... Read more
Lean Manufacturing is "In" More Than Ever Do more with less in tough times. Doubling your capacity and cutting lead times to a quarter of what they were might sound like a dream, but it is a dream that can become a reality.
Just ask Val Zanchuk, president of Graphicast Inc., a 29-employee foundry and machine shop in Jaffrey, N.H. The entrepreneur was able to make this dream a reality by adopting the Lean Manufacturing philosophy.
He admits, though, that he didn’t have a choice. His business is built on the rapid turnaround of machined castings made from a zinc-aluminum alloy injected into graphite molds... Read more
OEE Goes Real Time
Plants find efficiencies through dynamic or real-time measurement of equipment effectiveness.
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) metrics are coming in handy during this recession. OEE is a set of measurements that tracks the availability, performance and quality output of plant equipment.
More and more, plants are turning to OEE to get increased efficiencies from their existing equipment... Read more | 
