New Page 1

Dynamic Financial Models (Material & Energy Balances)

To be profitable in the chemical or metallurgical field, your process has to convert raw materials and energy into products more efficiently than your competitor's process. But, that's not enough. A lot of things have to come together to stay in business in this Global Economy. The accountant's Income Statement tells you how good you did last month, last year. Your engineers predict a rosier future given more resources. Each year new projects with outstanding ROI's are funded. But, somehow, most of the promised benefits are not reflected in the bottom-line. A powerful tool is needed that easily lets one evaluate how all the variables, project and process, impact the bottom line.

Improving profits, or evaluating the profitability of a new venture, is a challenging undertaking. In every project, dozen of decisions are made that impact the bottom line. Even the simplest of processes can surprise the best engineers and produce a string of surprises for management. Whether it is a new process still in the conceptual stage or an existing process, a tool is needed to bring all that is known about a process and its economics into a single format. The model must be simple enough to be built in a reasonable timeframe and accurate enough to realistically evaluate the impact of proposed changes on the bottom line.

If you want quick answers and something easy, don't mess with a model. Keep doing whatever you are doing. But if you understand that improvement takes work, it requires a format where all can work together, and it takes a sustained effort over months, sometimes even years, to have an efficient process, then consider a model as one of the tools to get there. You will also need a champion. Perhaps a young engineer that can maintain the program after we are gone and use it to learn about your operation and improve it all at the same time. The VBA code is open, anyone can make improvements (or screw it up). VBA coupled with Excel is a great tool that you are not capitalizing on. We can help you get there. Hundreds of subroutines for techno-economic modeling have already been developed; many of them will be useful in your facility. Of course, any unique unit operations must be added.

The goal is to get your best brains together and get all they know about the process and its economics in a single format, a techno-economic model. The model then educates everyone on how the pieces of the process all work together to make money or lose money. The model is steady state, but individual unit operations can be forced to run out of specification to see how it effects other unit operations and the bottom line.

Another thing you will discover. When we put the model together and each unit operation runs like your experts predict they should run, guess what. Your predicted profits will be higher than your actual profits. The reason is obvious. Your real process is not running like everyone, including your experts, think it is running. Now, to make more money in your process all you have to do is to identify which unit operations are not performing like your experts think it should. We either fix the model and bring it back to reality, or we fix the process and make it live up to its potential. Or more likely, a little of both. Yes, its not magic. Its tedious, its painful. But, it will work.

We are so sure it will work that we would be willing to take part of our pay from the savings we help generate.

Failure Analysis

Investigations

Root Cause Investigations Article

FA Questions

Industries

Failure Analysis Questionnaire

Corrosion

Under-Deposit Corrosion

SCC

Pitting

Other