COMPANY PROFILE

A synthetic emulsion polymers company that offers a diverse line of water-based emulsions including acrylic and styrene-acrylic latexes. They serve domestic and international customers with an extensive product line of water-based polymers. They have a strong corporate focus on customer care, product development, and flexible manufacturing. This privately held specialty chemical company is dedicated to innovation, quality, service, and sustainability. The company offers a diverse line of emulsion polymers which include acrylic, nitrile, styrene-acrylic, styrene-butadiene, vinyl acetate, vinyl acrylic, vinyl acetate-ethylene, and rheology modifiers. Their product offering serves a wide range of industries that include adhesives, nonwovens, paint, specialty coatings, graphic arts, printing and packaging, textiles, carpet, sealants, construction, oil services, and paper.

BUSINESS SITUATION

The chemical company was faced with supporting and maintaining an obsolete Distributed Control Systems (DCS). After careful study and consideration, it became clear that migrating to a new process control system was the only option to support sustained plant operations and expanded product offerings

Technical Situation

The existing DCS was obsolete and no longer supported by the manufacturer. It relied upon outdated proprietary networks. The need to make process improvements, support current PC technology and add additional batches were the driving forces for modernization. A migration solution needed to be implemented in annual phases during scheduled outages so as not to interrupt production. Multiple vendors and migration approaches were evaluated. Ultimately the five-year implementation was successfully condensed to four years, ahead of time and under budget with no interruptions to production.

Benefits

The operators were presented with a familiar visualization environment. Operators identified capabilities they saw the need for in the new system. Plant engineers and technicians could use a common set of tools they already understood to support and maintain the system. This minimized the amount and cost of training required. With a single source manufacturer solution, annual support costs were reduced. System hardware has proved reliable requiring less maintenance