## The World of Operations 

The world of operations in the process industries spans raw material supply to manufacturing to distribution, linking the plants and supply chain with the business. Within this world, process companies are under tremendous pressure to improve their operating performance, as return on capital employed (ROCE) and operating margins have been under downward pressure over the past two decades. Manufacturers face a number of significant challenges, including volatile raw material prices, overcapacity, environmental and regulatory requirements, and intense global competition. 

Historically, technology has played a major role in helping process companies drive profitability improvements. In the 1980s there was a major wave of IT investment in Distributed Control Systems (DCS), which improved plant-wide efficiency, and in the 1990s, the industry invested heavily in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to streamline the back office. 

## A Focus on Operational Excellence 

With the benefits of these systems largely realized, the process industries are looking to drive the next wave of profit improvement through Operational Excellence initiatives. So what is Operational Excellence? It is the continuous improvement of the research and development, engineering, manufacturing and supply chain processes that underpin operations to achieve operating efficiency and flexibility across the entire enterprise. 

The Aspen Engineering and Aspen Manufacturing/ Supply Chain product family applications are foundation blocks for Operational Excellence. 

Today, these applications provide “windows” into the world of operations and drive tremendous value in areas ranging from process lifecycle management to manufacturing operations management, to supply chain management. 

As process companies seek to unlock new sources of value, they are broadening their Operational Excellence focus, from individual departments and plants, to an enterprise-wide perspective of their global operations. This transformation is forcing operations personnel to work together within global, cross-functional business processes in order to make better, faster and more profitable decisions. These challenges are occurring at a time when the pace of change is accelerating for our customers and staffing levels have been reduced. 

## An Emerging New Market Space 

To meet this challenge, process companies are investing in next-generation solutions that are driving an emerging market space called Enterprise Operations Management (EOM). EOM encompasses today’s existing AspenTech and third- party operations products, plus new-generation vertical industry suites, which integrate and extend these products to unlock significant sources of new value and enable Operational Excellence across the enterprise. EOM closes the gap between the business (ERP) and plant floor (DCS) domains to enable what analysts call the “real-time enterprise”. 

EOM solutions arm operations personnel with virtual “cockpits” to provide visibility, look-forward analytics, workflow and event management, and performance scorecarding capabilities to drive better, faster and more profitable decisions for the company as a whole. These Web-enabled, role-specific “cockpits” encapsulate best-practice business processes, provide seamless access to applications, and work off of an asset knowledge warehouse comprised of disparate, distributed models and data. 

The result is significant improvements in operating performance and profitability. Additionally, EOM solutions lower the cost of integrating existing AspenTech and third-party point applications, lowering the IT lifecycle cost of ownership. 

We believe EOM is the next major IT investment wave in the process industries. We have responded by being the “first to market” with the most complete and modular set of EOM solutions. 

“In the first year, we achieved millions of euros of savings through the utilities optimization of our 55 plants , with recurring annual benefits. We now have an improved understanding of our processes, which is helping us make better decisions at the business level.” 

—Geert-Jan de Laat Project Management & Studies DSM TechnoPartners 

