HSC has been using and expanding upon Sigmafine for nearly a decade to help with inventory control and quality. We have built a model of our entire plant with Sigmafine and are monitoring every major flow to and from all of our columns, tanks, and reactors. While we are currently only doing mass balances, we do plan, after upgrading to Sigmafine 4.7, to start implementing component balances around key sections of the plant that are too “black box-like” in our current model. 

One of the ways we have expanded upon Sigmafine is by integrating it with our SAP HANA instance. We have extended the Asset Framework templates, in addition to creating many of our own, to specify what materials are in each stream and whether those streams consume or produce that material. Using custom AF SDK-based applications, upon case completion, the total production and consumption of each material is posted against our site’s inventory totals in SAP.   

All this said, most of the work is done by Sigmafine. The complexity of our model permits a holistic view of the process and site. Its tight integration with our PI system (which has been in place for more than 25 years) allows us to assess the plant’s operational “health” with remarkably little effort.