As specialized medicine and related treatment start to take hold, the
production of specialty chemicals, of the constitutions of chemical
solutions, biochemical solutions and biologics-suspensions has become
paramount, and consequentially, the Specialty Chemical Industry becomes
critical to the healthcare needs. Of particular observation is that
cancer treatment biologics suspensions, chemical solutions, what have
you, are but one class of such specialty chemicals. Then there are the
reagents for diagnostic analysis and virus infections testing which
constitute another class of products of the same industry.
Irrespective of the class of specialty chemicals these production
operations are usually of one off need demand; and such demands
therefore are of the batch production type, and also of short duration
operations. The volumes of productions of these chemicals at the moment
are usually small because of the cost-restricted market size and
patient-specificity respect to some of them. While the reagents of
diagnostics and virus testing often are required in large volumes, such
reagents are usually sought after only during the periods of viral
infection spread.
Yet, often the tendency is to use one off vessels and equipment as is
reasonable to do from a design standpoint given the challenges of wash
clean such vessels and equipment in addition to the cost of
sterilization before reuse. However, drugs regulatory agencies often
facilitate this path through the regulatory guidance they give towards
the production of such chemicals.
These niche-specificities of demand and small volume demand therefore,
often make such medications very expensive and further restrict the
markets and as such impact the overall viability of corporations in the
industry. For one thing the short duration operations attendant to the
small volume productions further impacts the design of the process, as
well as the choice of the engineering materials used for the design of
the process. After all, normal chemical process plants are generally
designed and operated with the expectation of being fully depreciated
over thirty (30) years; but such can not be the realization in the
operations of specialty chemicals production operations. Then, of
course, the environmental concerns centered on Sustainability factors
and social responsibility also argues against the use single-use vessels
and equipment by Specialty Chemicals company, even for the production of
such critical chemicals, biochemicals and biologics-suspensions; because
of the added demand imposed by the disposal requirements of used
equipment.
Obviously, there is the need to spread out the cost of production over
long durations of time such that the initial capital investment is
recoverable through depreciation and such that the cost of product is
affordable as to ensure the existence of demand for the product; but
that design approach also goes to support the need to choose process
equipment materials that do not require frequent disposal.
The conflicting demands to specialty medicines productions therefore
pose one of the major challenges as the design of the chemical,
biochemical and biological processes that are required to support
corporations in the specialty chemicals industries. Effectively, a
specialty chemicals corporation should opt for a flexibility-imbued
process design and construction as of paramount consideration for
enabling both short run continuous process and batch run processes for
the production of these specialty chemicals.
In this context of operations, the viability of a
corporation in the specialty chemicals industry is determined to a great
extent on its capacity of its operations to ensure certain broad
requirements, a set of broad Design Specifications, that must be
included in the
- wash-ability of the process equipments,
- the choice of materials that ensure virtual
absence of equipment-wall fouling,
- the minimum number of products scope and
production schedules that supports optimality under methods of linear
programming constraints,
- the minimum number of ready-assembled specialty
process for production of set number of products as determined through
the optimal analysis of linear programming
- the dynamic disassembly and reassembly into
different process layout for the production of a different products as
is needed.
While specific implementation considerations of
these broad Design Specifications are engineering design issues, the
significance of the specifications in viability analytics lies in the
size of the downtimes of the production operations, and the impact of
such on the production capacity of the plant.
To that end, a corporation with its business in the
sub-industry of the Specialty Chemicals Industry has one of two options
to design of its production process plant and facility support:
On-Demand Process Layout implementations: Deploy only process units that
must and can be dynamically restructured or reconstructed, with minimal
downtimes, to implement different product-specific process layouts to
produce on-demand products on production schedules; Fixed-Count
Assembled Layout Process: The corporation has a fixed number of products
and has processes pre-assembled in place and ready for use as the need
arises even though some may be left idle at certain times; which must
also be fully contained and enclosed within a facility for Intellectual
Property protection and Cyber-security. By either
method of production though, the necessary object would be the capacity to
produce specialty chemicals of various mixes to reach optimal revenue
generation as to be viable.
Evaluating the operations or proposed operations of
a Specialty Chemicals corporation for its viability therefore is not
trivial as amongst all else there is the need to perform the detailed
Production Analytics of the production plant. Neither the analytics
implementation of multi-process plants nor of dynamic
disassembly-reassembly plant is not very computation intensive: The former
involves expansive computations platform, and the latter entails dynamic
constituting of virtual process layout for the assessing the revenue
contribution of each product line. These considerations, of course, are
essential features of the company’s Production Analytics that is
a core component of the
Viability Analytics performed for
corporations in the Specialty Chemical Industry, the results of which are
available for the advisory of investors active in the industry |
