Clariant Excellence Initiative Produces Corporate-wide Shake-up

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A Critical Look at Four Sites

During the nine-month pilot phase, the company took a critical look at four sites including Gendorf in Bavaria/Germany and Mount Holly in the US. Both are typical chemical plants with multi-purpose and batch production facilities. Mount Holly is the major Industrial & Consumer Specialties Businesses site in North America, while Gendorf is the biggest Industrial & Consumer Specialties Business Unit production facility worldwide.

Two other pilot sites in Italy and Singapore are typical master batch production facilities. The corporation operates 50 of these sites worldwide. Riedel estimates that worldwide introduction of Operational Excellence, which is currently in progress, will take around three years. A team of experts will be spending a lot of time in airplanes during that period, as the sites are spread across three continents.

Major corporate goals for the Operational Excellence program include definition of best practices and implementation of a production system to create comparable processes and standards worldwide. “That is more difficult to achieve with chemicals than with master batches because of greater differences in production. However during the initial phase, we are addressing production flows rather than engineering process design,” explained Riedel. The next step will be to increase yields and improve energy efficiency. The pilot project is currently getting underway.

Acting Out of Conviction

The team of corporate experts spends 5–6 weeks looking at all of the processes which are related to production. “Observation out on the production floor is a key aspect of the review. We call that ‘one day in the life of an operator’, and the assessment includes both day and night shifts,” reported Riedel. Mobilizing, discussing and motivating have become ingrained habits for the team. Riedel is not the only one who has learned a lot. No progress can be made without examples, facts, figures and transparency. Initially, it was not easy to get all managers to support the change process, he added.

It is important to get everyone on board, and management has to cope with big changes as well. Over the coming months, managers will have to drive implementation of the roadmap which was developed in collaboration with the core team. They will need to change the way they manage the business and keep the change process on the front burner. Riedel takes a pragmatic view. “Once we were able to present some initial results, things got easier.”

Some impressive results have already been achieved. At a typical chemical plant, productivity can be increased by 6–8%. A 10% increase is not unrealistic at master batch plants. In total, work has been carried out on more than 1,000 large and small projects, and the financial returns are worth the effort. Clariant achieved savings of 13 million Swiss francs in 2009, and the figure rose to 50 million in 2010. Senior management expects the savings to surpass even that amount in 2011.

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