QUESTION 1

Technical Insights
1. The PO factory team observed a threat in the companys economic
status.
If we are going to compare the old existing CLSBE units with the
vendors offer, it can be clearly observed that our equipment, though
still functioning efficiently enough (good percentage turnouts for the
overflow and underflow streams), are undeniably behind and outdated.
This can be seen from the maximum capacity per unit of the kernel
flakes per day of the old (800 tons) vs the vendors choice (8000 tons),
all of which may be causing the going down of the sales or economic
trend of the company compared to the last few years.
Also, external burden is also affecting the PO leadership team to urge
me to immediately design a new equipment, since it is foreseen that
there will be a higher demand for PKO in the next five years, to meet
these increasing demands. In short, the team is probably very eager to
compensate with the loss that they have observed and is currently
pressured to keep up with the increasing demands of PKO in the
market.
2. Important parameters are not optimized.
A shown in the recent reports, different variables are affecting the
percent residual oil remaining in the palm kernel flakes. The effect of
each variable is shown below. Out of the three plots, the amount of
solvent has the lowest slope which implies that the percent oil
remaining is a weak function of the type of solvent used.

Effect of different parameters to % oil remaining

8
7
f(x) = - 0.08x + 8.6
6 Amount of Sol vent
%oil remaining

5 Li near (Amount of Sol vent)

Temperature
4
Li near (Temperature)
3
Ti me
f(x) = - 0.01x + 3.3
2 Li near (Time)
1 f(x) = - 0.07x + 3.05
0
0 50 100 150 200 250
Parameters

3. The PO factory leadership team doesnt want to take risk to try other
methods despite researches conducted.
Obviously, the R&D Department took time, effort, and money to
conduct studies, experiments and validation to come up with a better
 understanding and possible improvement of the whole production
system of PKO. But despite these, the PO factory leadership team
neglected the technical advantages the studies might bring as they
prioritize profit (they wat the new CLSBE as soon as possible lead time
and at the lowest cost). The team wants to stick with the old, tested
method of using CLSBE, using hexane as the solvent, despite the newly
available knowledge and methods to avoid the chance of failure during
the trial and error process, and to save money as well.

How will my technical insights impact:

1) The way I will plan for the project execution
I will use the Six Sigma Methodology for existing processes (shown below) to
organize my project execution as it is well known, tried and tested to improve
processes, and as I have experienced success in my line of work using this
method.

Define Measure Analyze Improve Control

I fully recognize that my goal is to improve the system for the long existing
CLSBE processes in our company falling below specification and looking for
incremental improvement to meet the demands by starting up a new CLSBE
unit with better specifications.

2) The composition of my core project team and of my adhoc set of technical

and/or business resources
Logistics -available for repair
Finance -
Technical -Specs
Secretariat