informatics in petrochemicals
The Pearl GTL (gas to liquids facility) at Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar
Mansoor Al-Shamri, laboratory manager, and Ajith Kumar, senior business analyst, in the Pearl GTL laboratory
itself, leads to errors and thus more costs as these have to be traced and corrected. ‘It’s easier to get to the data with a LIMS than to customise data-gathering from SAP,’ he said.
The challenges of continuous processes Most companies, he continued, are going down the route of building in quality at every stage of the process. Tis means that between 50 and 90 per cent of the samples going to the analytical laboratory are from in-process testing, rather than raw materials or output. ‘Tat tells you a lot about the focus of the company,’ he said. He also believes it is appropriate to the continuous
ULTIMATELY,
system, but such soſtware tends to be batch- oriented, and so a dedicated LIMS may be better suited to the huge volume of samples being taken and, if instrument integration is possible, there are huge savings to be made in eliminating manual data entry. For Yves Dupont, senior manager for
oil and gas at informatics consultancy LabAnswer, a dedicated LIMS will not only reduce costs but increase revenues ‘because you can provide data that is more real- time to the manufacturing process, so they can take action quicker to increase plant efficiency or decrease variance and thus produce more, higher-quality products.’ In contrast, even though enterprise resource planning soſtware such as SAP has a quality control module built in, he believes that the manual data entry required is costly in
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COMPANIES AVOID DISRUPTION IN PRODUCTION, WHICH IMPROVES COST- EFFECTIVENESS
nature of the process: ‘You don’t have a batch so it’s difficult to do finished-product testing, but you can tap the pipeline.’ In contrast, he feels that for most ERP systems and their quality control modules, ‘the basic transaction is creating a batch’ even though with continuous processes, you never finish the batch. ‘Generally speaking, what we see
because of history is a LIMS system at each site potentially with local reports or workflows, rather than a global centralised LIMS’ serving the company
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as a whole, he continued. Tere is usually a local implementation. ‘In the pharma world, they would use a more centralised approach partly because of the validation costs associated with each site having its own instance, customisations, and processes.’ In the regulated environment of the pharmaceutical industry, it is usually cheaper to bring in a single, pre-validated system for the entire enterprise across all labs and countries than to pay separately for individual validation. In petrochemicals, by contrast, each
site will adapt the LIMS to meet the requirements of its own workflows. Mergers and acquisitions have also lead to a proliferation of LIMS from different vendors at different sites, he said. ‘It’s only when there’s a corporate upgrade that you’d see a platform rationalisation and simplification project.’
Efficiency and product quality Te payoff between investing in a LIMS and improvements in efficiency and quality of product are just as evident in northern Europe, in the view of Adam Wahlund, Marketing Manager for Bytewize. Over the past decade, he said, ‘we have experienced an increased need for LIMS in petrochemical laboratories. I think companies have learned how much time and money they can save by regular analysis. Tanks to a LIMS, the laboratory work is more efficient and accurate. If, for example, there is water in insulating oil, the quality of the oil is decreased. Gas in transformer oil means that the transformer isn’t working properly. By regularly taking samples and sending
APRIL/MAY 2013 7
Shell/Qatar Petroleum
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