Enabling technologies for enterprise reliability

The Dow Chemical Company is a reliable corporation and sets and performs against very high standards in the industry. However to meet the challenges of increasing global competition, dynamic markets for products and feedstocks and rising customer expectations, Dow has been on a multi-year journey to achieving the higher levels of enterprise-wide reliability. This is a critical component to Dow's growth strategy. Enterprise Reliability is the activity of designing and achieving reliability in all activities across the entire corporation, regardless of location, function, or business, toward the aspiration of flawlessly meeting all stakeholder commitments each and every time. Decision support tools are an important technology for Enterprise Reliability and we have adapted three traditional reliability modeling and analysis tools to meet this need. This paper presents three aspects this technology: 1) Value Stream Simulation, 2) Value Stream Optimization and 3) Data Analytics in the context of the Dow's Enterprise Reliability. These technologies were discussed in terms of the issues associated with the development, validation and deployment of the technologies to be actively used to make operating and investment decisions. Our conclusion after two years of implementation is that clarity on the data required from the models for decision making, clarity of the owner of decisions, and clarity of the structure and assumption of the models and methodologies are the keys to integrating efforts across divisions and lead to improved decision making across the envelop and lead to opportunities with a significant ROI.