COURSE OVERVIEW

This practical and highly-interactive course includes various practical sessions and exercises. Theory learnt will be applied using the “MS Excel” applications.
This course is designed to provide participants with a complete and up-to-date overview of the principles of operations planning. It covers the concepts of operational profitability including gross plant margin, net plant margin and contribution margin; the process plant configuration covering reactors, separators, product handling system, QA/QC system, feedstock and packing/packaging; the planning objectives that includes production plans, selecting feedstock, feasibility, optimality, optimal product mix, marginal economics, investment opportunities and planning versus scheduling; the various planning tools; the blending methods and process models; and the modeling tools covering simple stock balances (spreadsheet), linear programming (LP’s), non-linear programming (NLP’s), distributed error recursion and integer programming.
Further, the course will also cover the various model types pertaining to mixing, multi-product and distribution, single product and time period; the product qualities; the product pricing; the practical plant modeling; the market dynamics covering the supply and demand vise as well as global versus local markets; managing risk using term contracts, hedging and risk versus reward; and the performance measures for benchmark margin analysis, model validation and back-casting.