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Welcome To Nova Chemicals
Major Petrochemical Supplier Uses JobTime in its Testing Laboratory
Nova Chemicals is the world's fifth largest producer of a vast variety of products, including plastic resins. In Calgary, Canada, Nova maintains extensive quality control, testing, and research and development laboratories. Over 250 technologists work in a series of laboratories who receive daily requests from clients to check quality issues, test new products, or to extend the company's vast proprietary product knowledge.
At the Nova Chemicals Technical Center, testing begins in the "Applications Laboratory" with the fabrication of requested samples on one or more machines. NCTC has a complete array of equipment for plastics injection extrusion and molding equipment. Scheduling the equipment also requires recognition of labor skills of the technologists trained and certified as qualified on different machines. Production schedules must assure both the availability of equipment, as well as qualified applications laboratory technologists.
Following fabrication of samples, the samples must then face destructive testing, across numerous possible machines. Every conceivable form of stress or destruction that can face a plastic product, is concocted and performed by the scientists working in the Analytical and Physical and other laboratories.
The motivation for scheduling arises from the simple fact that the world demand for new products, quality assurance checks on new blends of resins, and urgent support requests from clients, all combine to create a classic finite capacity scheduling problem.
Implementation required import from an Oracle based LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System), which is owned by the Honeywell Corporation. A nightly query automatically extracts all information for new samples, status of tests most recently performed, due-dates and priorities of all work for all of the laboratories. Reports can be generated automatically and deployed by print or HTML pages via internet for Laboratory views.
JobTime now provides up to date checklists for all of the laboratories on a daily basis, a task that was previously performed for the secondary labs only once weekly under the previous manual system. The schedule of the primary Applications Lab supports manual scheduling, providing feasible solutions, which can be adjusted to meet fluctuations in technologist availabilities.
It is interesting to note that although Nova Chemical has a corporate wide license to use a major APS system, the development cost of using that alternative alone was approximately double the cost of the full JobTime software and implementation itself. Therefore, Nova Chemicals selected JobTime for its laboratory scheduling application.
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JobTime Systems, Inc.
P. O. Box 6100, San Mateo, CA 94403
Tel: (650) 570-7900
FAX: (650) 5707902
Internet: requestinformation@jobtime.com