Cutting the mustard
28 Nov 2006
The Bayer CropScience facility in Norwich is facing up to competition from low labour-cost regions
Global competition is the name of the game at the Bayer CropScience (BCS) facility in Norwich, which faces challenges from companies in low labour-cost regions — as well as from other BCS facilities in countries ranging from Germany and the US to China and India.
Since original owner May & Baker moved to the Sweet Briar Road site on the outskirts of the city 50 years ago, the facility has operated under the ownership of Rhone Poulenc and then Aventis until 2002 when it was acquired by Bayer.
The operation today employs around 280 people in the manufacture of active ingredient and formulated crop protection chemicals. These are produced across 14 different plants housing batch reactors ranging in size from 500 - 25,000 litres, together producing 15 kilotonnes a year.
The Norwich site is accredited to ISO9001, ISO14001 and last year joined a select group of operators to hold OHSAS18001, which covers occupational health and safety management. The company's local community relations and environmental initiatives, meanwhile, earned it this year's Chemical Industry Community Award from the Chemical Industries Association.
But perhaps what best defines the company is its flexible operating practices and a "can do" approach to tackling global competitive pressures, according to Peter Jessop, QHSE and Engineering manager.
"At the end of the day, we have to do things smarter than they do in India or China, or it's all going to go that way. Alternatively, if the costs are too high, the product will be undercut by someone else with a generic alternative," he said.
Indeed, over the last few months it has been announced that manufacture of two products will move from the site to India and another has been sold to a Japanese company. Closer to home, Bayer has recently announced the sale of its BCS Widnes plant — leaving Norwich as the sole BCS manufacturing operation in the UK.
Against that, the UK site has held its own in many areas; building a £16-million plant to manufacture a new molecule five years ago and taking on production of another new molecule on an existing plant three years ago. There are also a series of on-going investments to develop the infrastructure, automation and production facilities at the site today.
Perhaps the central feature of the operation is its flexible labour system, which employs six plant managers for all plants, each manned by just two or three operators per shift. The production teams are backed by a team of specialist maintenance and technical personnel.
On the active ingredients plants, for example, there are currently 12 maintenance specialists who all do two or three roles — including fitting, machining, welding and electrical work — supported by six instrument/electrical contractors — said Malcolm Ackerley, site maintenance manager.
"Our workforce is very flexible and very competent in moving around different areas of the site, often dealing with very different chemistries. The plant managers never just sit there and this keeps us busy," said Ackerley.
The ability to move manning around the plant is particularly important as not all plants run all the time at the site, with units shutdown, for example, due to low demand or for annual maintenance.
"This gives maintenance a challenge, as although plant availability might be relatively low, the planning of labour has got to deliver a high availability to ensure the plant runs exactly when we want it to," explained Ackerley. "Some plants also run in campaigns so we need them to start reliably and we need to decommission them in a proper and effective way."
While the Norwich operation has contracted out many non-core maintenance activities, it has not gone down the route of some chemicals makers in outsourcing all engineering or all maintenance. "We don't see that as a viable model," said Ackerley.
"We have a core of people well versed in working with chemicals who work on the more technically challenging pieces of equipment. All the other add-ons we contract out. That's been our model," he said.
Training programmes, such as those based on City & Guilds and NVQ 2-4 for process operations, also play a role in labour flexibility by ensuring that operators can do routine maintenance work.
However, warned Ackerley, many skills need to be practised. "You can't train operators to run six different processes, do a whole load of maintenance activities and expect them to maintain their skills. You have to target training to what you want from your people. Sometimes specialism is a good thing — it's what we require."
Alongside the skills base, Jessop sees further automation and control of a number of plants from one control room as important for the long-term success of the site. To achieve this, he said, we would first need to eliminate, as much as possible, manual interventions and more on line analysis would be required across the operation.
Automation on all bar two plants is based on either DCS systems from Foxboro and Fisher Provox or PLC systems from Rockwell, said Ackerley. The Fisher Provox system, however, has "served its purpose" since it was installed in 1993 and is now being replaced by a Siemens system which is part of a £750,000 plant improvement project, scheduled for start-up by September 2007.
"Both from a commercial and a technology point of view, the Siemens system stood out in term of what it gives us, with one key element being the integration of safety systems" said Ackerley. The fact that Bayer runs Siemens systems at many of its German sites also gives added leverage to the Norwich plant as a relatively small customer, he added.
The BCS managers are mindful of the "sometimes prohibitive" costs of keeping systems updated with licences, hardware and software. DCS systems installed at the Norwich site quite often require high ongoing support costs to change software and expand the system architecture when plant process improvements take place.
Ackerley added that software often requires a high degree of skill to maintain, which reduces users' effectiveness in keeping costs under control. "It is better to have a system that is generally easy to keep up-to-date, maintain, troubleshoot and improve without needing a degree in software engineering."
Emphasis on safety
There is a major emphasis on safety at the site, starting with a sign stating "How many days since the last Lost Time Accident," as people pass through the entry turnstiles — when PE visited, the figures were 387 days for employees and 40 for contractors. The company's definition of an LTA is an accident when somebody is unable to work the following day, rather than three days under the HSE's definition.
"If you go back to the 1990s, there were 16-17 LTA's a year on site. We are now down to zero or one," said Jessop. "This is a step-change in awareness of safety and being proactive in eliminating unsafe practices in areas such as manual handling."
The company had many elements of its safety system in place before gaining OHSAS18001 accreditation, but the process helped in making sure everything fitted together. Now the management is planning to look at the behavioural aspects of accidents.
"You can eliminate a lot of issues like manual handling; what is more difficult to deal with is behaviour," explained Jessop. "Often with accidents it is people carrying out unsafe practices because they're trying to help … that's a pattern [of behaviour] we have to break."
Energy issue
Energy is a major issue at Bayer CropScience's Norwich operation, which has managed to reduce electricity consumption to around 2-2.5MW, down from some 2.5-3MW a few years ago.
Since 1995, the site has operated a 4.4MW Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant to generate steam and power to the operation, which employs around 450 pumps and 600 motors. The operation makes extensive use of high efficiency and variable speed drives and controls that switch off rotating equipment when not required.
Recent energy initiatives include the development of models to enable managers to see how energy is being used in any particular part of a plant. There are also programmes to ensure steam leaks are eliminated, condensate traps maintained and everything from lights to PCs switched off when they are not needed.
The company has plans to revisit its processes to see if everything needs to be heated or cooled "to the last degree". Another scheme envisages the use of a thermographic camera to help optimise pipeline insulation systems.
The heat demand profile of the factory is very variable; in particular during the summer it is not possible to operate the CHP efficiently at low steam demands. The company has found that shutting down the CHP and operating a high turn down burner on the standby boiler can minimise gas usage. This reduces the overall electrical efficiency of the CHP plant but under normal circumstances BCS can still obtain the required electrical efficiency at minimum primary energy cost.
"We actually turned off the CHP plant for two weeks recently, which made the plant look inefficient but the price of gas was too high. This is ridiculous really when you can buy in electricity cheaper than we produce it here — and we are a low-cost producer with the CHP plant," said Ackerley
"The site benefited hugely from the CHP plant for several years, but in the last three years the benefits have become very questionable. We can see a point coming when economically it will be of benefit again, but not as much as in the past," he concluded.
Since original owner May & Baker moved to the Sweet Briar Road site on the outskirts of the city 50 years ago, the facility has operated under the ownership of Rhone Poulenc and then Aventis until 2002 when it was acquired by Bayer.
The operation today employs around 280 people in the manufacture of active ingredient and formulated crop protection chemicals. These are produced across 14 different plants housing batch reactors ranging in size from 500 - 25,000 litres, together producing 15 kilotonnes a year.
The Norwich site is accredited to ISO9001, ISO14001 and last year joined a select group of operators to hold OHSAS18001, which covers occupational health and safety management. The company's local community relations and environmental initiatives, meanwhile, earned it this year's Chemical Industry Community Award from the Chemical Industries Association.
But perhaps what best defines the company is its flexible operating practices and a "can do" approach to tackling global competitive pressures, according to Peter Jessop, QHSE and Engineering manager.
"At the end of the day, we have to do things smarter than they do in India or China, or it's all going to go that way. Alternatively, if the costs are too high, the product will be undercut by someone else with a generic alternative," he said.
Indeed, over the last few months it has been announced that manufacture of two products will move from the site to India and another has been sold to a Japanese company. Closer to home, Bayer has recently announced the sale of its BCS Widnes plant — leaving Norwich as the sole BCS manufacturing operation in the UK.
Against that, the UK site has held its own in many areas; building a £16-million plant to manufacture a new molecule five years ago and taking on production of another new molecule on an existing plant three years ago. There are also a series of on-going investments to develop the infrastructure, automation and production facilities at the site today.
Perhaps the central feature of the operation is its flexible labour system, which employs six plant managers for all plants, each manned by just two or three operators per shift. The production teams are backed by a team of specialist maintenance and technical personnel.
On the active ingredients plants, for example, there are currently 12 maintenance specialists who all do two or three roles — including fitting, machining, welding and electrical work — supported by six instrument/electrical contractors — said Malcolm Ackerley, site maintenance manager.
"Our workforce is very flexible and very competent in moving around different areas of the site, often dealing with very different chemistries. The plant managers never just sit there and this keeps us busy," said Ackerley.
The ability to move manning around the plant is particularly important as not all plants run all the time at the site, with units shutdown, for example, due to low demand or for annual maintenance.
"This gives maintenance a challenge, as although plant availability might be relatively low, the planning of labour has got to deliver a high availability to ensure the plant runs exactly when we want it to," explained Ackerley. "Some plants also run in campaigns so we need them to start reliably and we need to decommission them in a proper and effective way."
While the Norwich operation has contracted out many non-core maintenance activities, it has not gone down the route of some chemicals makers in outsourcing all engineering or all maintenance. "We don't see that as a viable model," said Ackerley.
"We have a core of people well versed in working with chemicals who work on the more technically challenging pieces of equipment. All the other add-ons we contract out. That's been our model," he said.
Training programmes, such as those based on City & Guilds and NVQ 2-4 for process operations, also play a role in labour flexibility by ensuring that operators can do routine maintenance work.
However, warned Ackerley, many skills need to be practised. "You can't train operators to run six different processes, do a whole load of maintenance activities and expect them to maintain their skills. You have to target training to what you want from your people. Sometimes specialism is a good thing — it's what we require."
Alongside the skills base, Jessop sees further automation and control of a number of plants from one control room as important for the long-term success of the site. To achieve this, he said, we would first need to eliminate, as much as possible, manual interventions and more on line analysis would be required across the operation.
Automation on all bar two plants is based on either DCS systems from Foxboro and Fisher Provox or PLC systems from Rockwell, said Ackerley. The Fisher Provox system, however, has "served its purpose" since it was installed in 1993 and is now being replaced by a Siemens system which is part of a £750,000 plant improvement project, scheduled for start-up by September 2007.
"Both from a commercial and a technology point of view, the Siemens system stood out in term of what it gives us, with one key element being the integration of safety systems" said Ackerley. The fact that Bayer runs Siemens systems at many of its German sites also gives added leverage to the Norwich plant as a relatively small customer, he added.
The BCS managers are mindful of the "sometimes prohibitive" costs of keeping systems updated with licences, hardware and software. DCS systems installed at the Norwich site quite often require high ongoing support costs to change software and expand the system architecture when plant process improvements take place.
Ackerley added that software often requires a high degree of skill to maintain, which reduces users' effectiveness in keeping costs under control. "It is better to have a system that is generally easy to keep up-to-date, maintain, troubleshoot and improve without needing a degree in software engineering."
Emphasis on safety
There is a major emphasis on safety at the site, starting with a sign stating "How many days since the last Lost Time Accident," as people pass through the entry turnstiles — when PE visited, the figures were 387 days for employees and 40 for contractors. The company's definition of an LTA is an accident when somebody is unable to work the following day, rather than three days under the HSE's definition.
"If you go back to the 1990s, there were 16-17 LTA's a year on site. We are now down to zero or one," said Jessop. "This is a step-change in awareness of safety and being proactive in eliminating unsafe practices in areas such as manual handling."
The company had many elements of its safety system in place before gaining OHSAS18001 accreditation, but the process helped in making sure everything fitted together. Now the management is planning to look at the behavioural aspects of accidents.
"You can eliminate a lot of issues like manual handling; what is more difficult to deal with is behaviour," explained Jessop. "Often with accidents it is people carrying out unsafe practices because they're trying to help … that's a pattern [of behaviour] we have to break."
Energy issue
Energy is a major issue at Bayer CropScience's Norwich operation, which has managed to reduce electricity consumption to around 2-2.5MW, down from some 2.5-3MW a few years ago.
Since 1995, the site has operated a 4.4MW Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant to generate steam and power to the operation, which employs around 450 pumps and 600 motors. The operation makes extensive use of high efficiency and variable speed drives and controls that switch off rotating equipment when not required.
Recent energy initiatives include the development of models to enable managers to see how energy is being used in any particular part of a plant. There are also programmes to ensure steam leaks are eliminated, condensate traps maintained and everything from lights to PCs switched off when they are not needed.
The company has plans to revisit its processes to see if everything needs to be heated or cooled "to the last degree". Another scheme envisages the use of a thermographic camera to help optimise pipeline insulation systems.
The heat demand profile of the factory is very variable; in particular during the summer it is not possible to operate the CHP efficiently at low steam demands. The company has found that shutting down the CHP and operating a high turn down burner on the standby boiler can minimise gas usage. This reduces the overall electrical efficiency of the CHP plant but under normal circumstances BCS can still obtain the required electrical efficiency at minimum primary energy cost.
"We actually turned off the CHP plant for two weeks recently, which made the plant look inefficient but the price of gas was too high. This is ridiculous really when you can buy in electricity cheaper than we produce it here — and we are a low-cost producer with the CHP plant," said Ackerley
"The site benefited hugely from the CHP plant for several years, but in the last three years the benefits have become very questionable. We can see a point coming when economically it will be of benefit again, but not as much as in the past," he concluded.
