Walking the Walk of a Leader

While many people can talk a good talk, the keynote address given by Bob Wojewodka, technology manager for The Lubrizol Corp., at the recent Emerson Global Users Exchange, highlighted a company that knows how to walk the walk.

Wojewodka’s presentation focused on how Lubrizol, a $4 billion, Wickliffe, Ohio-based producer of specialty chemicals, undertook a migration modernization initiative that coupled business objectives to production plans. The goal was to have full vertical and horizontal integration of data from the shop floor through the business layer to achieve operational excellence.

Said Wojewodka, “The company was already pretty successful, but the business issue we tackled was to enhance our efficiency and profitability by further improving our manufacturing and control systems. We needed to become holistic in our approach to what we called the Operations Management Systems (OMS) mission.”

Lubrizol standardized on the Delta V and PlantWeb platforms from Emerson Process Management, of Austin, Texas, and is deploying advanced control and asset management strategies. Data is integrated horizontally across platforms to run the plant better, and integrated vertically to connect the plant floor to the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

“What’s different about this initiative,” said Wojewodka, “is that we started at the business and infrastructure level, in order to drive production plans for the next several years.” There were five teams formed under the OMS initiative: Standards, Migration, Technology, Business Opportunities and Integration/Architecture. The teams deployed formal metrics to measure results, and used a Quantified Business Results (QBR) calculator to accurately measure more than 40 touch points in the process, such as quality, variability and human resources.

According to Wojewodka, even the company’s chief financial officer is impressed with the results, so much so that the methodology will be deployed across the organization. More than 30 projects have been completed to date, and 30 more are scheduled over the next two years.