Interview

Kemira Oyj / Finland

Rutger Wever, EHSQ Manager, EMEA West & Central

Prior to the Global ManuChem Strategies 2014, we spoke to Rutger Wever, EHSQ Manager, EMEA West & Central, Kemira Oyj / Finland
we.CONECT: In your opinion: What are the main current challenges and trends regarding management and optimization of chemical production and what are the specific challenges related to your company? Rutger Wever: Our company probably is fairly typical for European chemical manufacturing. The companys m ain challenges are twofold: Firstly, to address changes in demand volumes and geographies, and, secondly, manage an ageing manufacturing asset base; both while maintaining excellent cost control. We see a tendency to consolidate chemical production, and utilize plants well beyond their initial foreseen life span. The consequences: consolidation forces supply chains and manufacturing units to be highly efficient, responsive and flexible. Ageing plants require highly competent staff to ensure reliable and safe operations. Doing this while exercising cost control will require optimization of processes and elimination of hassles throughout the total supply chain. This includes hassles resulting from incidents, illustrating my interest in the topic: whatever we can do to drive down incidents in industry, this benefits a well-organized supply chain and therefore serves our customers. we.CONECT: Looking to volatility in commodity markets, which role plays operations management, specifically S&OP and plant capacity management? Rutger Wever: In order to stay profitable it is of the highest essence that companies optimize their manufacturing asset base. Sites cannot be opened and closed arbitrarily so the challenge in operations management is to always be on the lookout for opportunities. You may not need it today but it is certainly asked tomorrow. S&OP and plant capacity management essentially deal with trying to address this optimization need. The more effective this is done, the better it exploits the smaller and bigger opportunities that would otherwise have been ignored. All of these contribute to addressing needs of our customers and the company financial results. we.CONECT: Do you use and / or plan to implement new technologies like MES, Big Data & Cloud Technologies? Rutger Wever: Kemira extensively uses SAP for planning purposes, both in optimizing stock levels and in smartly allocating manufacturing resources through e.g. Materials Resource Planning and Available-to-Promise mechanisms. Big Data is still underdeveloped while we feel there is sufficient room for improvement using more traditional approaches. A Cloud is currently not considered. we.CONECT: Do you use mobile technologies to optimize operator management and operator mobility? Rutger Wever : One highly successful application of mobile technology is the use of hand barcode readers in some of our warehouses. It allows our operators to move much more freely in our plant with stock and product info available at the push of a button. Improvement potential is in the area of maintenance (e.g. directly recording inspection/monitoring data in the maintenance system) and in manufacturing execution (e.g. recipe confirmations). we.CONECT Which role plays the topic critical infrastructures in relation to cyber security in your plant? Rutger Wever: All of our plants operate computer controlled processes, using programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or full digital control systems (DCSs). Kemira has taken care in virtually all of her plants that outside connections are physically impossible or severely restricted using infrastructure and software protection measures. we.CONECT: According to your presentation Designing, implementing and prioritising Process Safety Management program elements: practical experiences & suggested approaches, could you briefly introduce us to the project and what is important about this topic? Rutger Wever: Developed country chemical industry is facing a future with business and financial challenges. At the same time we need to exercise tight control of our safety and environmental performance, regulatory pressures, as well as the challenges that existing and ageing plants provide for day-to-day efficient operations. The project is addressing structural ways to identify and address potential weaknesses in the process safety area. These weaknesses, if left unchecked, may sooner or later develop into plant reliability, environmental and safety issues. Apart from the potential significant consequences to our staff, our assets and our neighbors, these issues will in turn affect the ability to ensure agile and efficient supply to our customers. That is a direct threat to continuity of our plants and companies. What is important is to match the resource and financial capabilities with the hazards identified and the project proposes a phased and risk based approach in order to address this. Lastly the project stresses the need for a positive team-wise approach to make this a success.

we.CONECT: How different will the Chemical Operations/Manufacturing of the year 2020 be from todays ones? Rutger Wever : I do not expect the world to return to last century stability. Markets will increasingly seek optimization and therefore require changes to allow flexibility and low cost without sacrificing on quality. Society will increasingly demand 100% protection against industrial accidents and environmental impact, regardless from formal regulation or existing acceptable norms. In 2020 we will have lost through retirement of a complete generation of chemical plant operators and engineers - significant competencies gained from the early years of manufacturing, and addressed this through increasing plant automation and remote operation. Even compared to today we will see many more unmanned, standalone units producing the chemicals a society needs. That also means that human intervention to fix an issue before it becomes a problem is no longer possible. More robust/reliable designs, good quality hazard analysis and safeguarding, and quick response capabilities from other company locations or even shared between companies will become more common in order to ensure uninterrupted supply chains, optimal production planning, and a robust, safe production. we.CONECT: Which question would you like to ask the delegates of our Global ManuCHEM Strategies 2014? Rutger Wever: I would like to invite all the delegates of ManuCHEM Strategies 2014 to participate in the presentation and engage in discussion, and ask two questions to each: 1. Which areas of operational management do you feel your company needs to spend most effort on to be absolutely sure we operate a plant that is efficient, safe and environmentally in best possible shape? Looking at the prioritization that Kemira puts in its Process Safety work, which issues are we underestimating or overestimating?

Global ManuChem Strategies brings together industry leaders to discuss the current state of the industry, the impact of new regulations and the challenge to increase efficiency in chemical operations and technical assets. Information about the event and we.CONECT can be found at: http://production-chemicals2014.weconect.com about

Contact: Henry Fuchs Managing Director / Product Management & Marketing Phone: +49 (0)30 52 10 70 3 44 Fax: +49 (0)30 52 10 70 3 30 Email: henry.fuchs@we-conect.com

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we.CONECT: Thanks a lot for this interview! Interview Partner: Peter Haack and Rutger Wever.
Rutger Wever has held various engineering and EHS managerial roles, responsible for safety & technical performance of Seveso-level chemical plants. Currently Rutger supports Kemiras Western & Central European sites on EHS and is standardising Kemiras Process Safety Management global policies. Rutger holds Chemical Engineering degrees from Twente University (NL) and Imperial College (London, UK), and a Business Science degree from Open University NL. He is married and lives in Rotterdam.