Joes Staples, head of Manufacturing Systems North America for Bayer CropScience (Kansas City, Mo.), has over 28 years of experience with continuous improvement of chemical manufacturing operations through the introduction and optimization of new technology. He discussed how Bayer CropScience uses Automation to Drive Operational Excellence. Bayer CropScience is evolving its operations management strategy to drive higher levels of collaboration, productivity and safety into its day-to-day operations using automated workflow technologies, MES, mobile operations and social networking tools.
Some of the business trend drivers of change include increased complexity, deeper and faster business cycles, sustained change and that everyone is being rebooted due to competition, turnover, raising the bar of performance, global distribution of resources and security,
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The company implemented management operations software applications including Workflow, historian and analysis tools from Invensys Wonderware. The system generates huge amounts of data that they are using to predict risk levels. Workflows and procedural applications monitor events and respond to deviations from normal across all applications and operation layers. He wants to digitize as much as possible.
In order to foster community he is investigating social network tools.
The realized and anticipated benefits of the new manufacturing operations management system includes:
- reduction of incidents
- retention and sustainability of knowledge
- improved performance
- consistency
- high velocity collaboration of experts
- better and more rapid focus on issues
