TABLE OF CONTENTS The book has covered fundamentals, tools, insights, and case studies on process integration (PI) for resource conservation and process optimization. Now, how do you create value by applying PI in an industrial setting and how do you start an actual process integration initiative or a project? This chapter sheds the light on key insights, common pitfalls, and necessary requirements for defining, launching, and implementing successful PI applications.
Competitive industrial facilities should always seek continuous process improvement . As such, these companies are constantly looking for ways to make their processes faster, more profitable, safer, cleaner, and higher quality. Process integration provides a unique and attractive framework to meet these objectives. However, because PI is a relatively new field, there are many process improvement projects that are implemented worldwide using brainstorming, heuristics, and trial and error. The pitfalls of these conventional approaches have been discussed in Chapter One. Nonetheless, these approach have contributed and continue to contribute value to the process industries. The question is whether or not there are opportunities within processing facilities and why? The answer is: absolutely yes! Regardless of the type and size of the process, there are always significant opportunities for improvement. Why? El-Halwagi and Spriggs (1998) attribute these opportunities to three main factors:
Organization: Because of the complexity of a processing facility, there is typically the tendency to subdivide the process into smaller, tractable portions. Sometimes, these subdivisions are at the level of sections of the plant and sometimes...
