L.

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Plant organisation
Plant organisation :
• Labour : direct and indirect operating labours
• man power
• logical job/position and responsibility
• fair job position
• shift time table.
Operating Labor
•In general, operating labor may be divided into
skilled and unskilled labor.
•In preliminary costs analyses, the quantity of
operating labor can often be estimated either
from company experience with similar
processes or from published information on
similar processes.
•If a flow sheet and drawings of the process are
available, the operating labor may be estimated
from an analysis of the work to be done.
• Consideration must be given to such items as the type
and arrangement of equipment, multiplicity of units,
amount of instrumentation and control for the process,
and company policy in establishing labor requirements.
• Table 21 indicates some typical labor requirements for
various types of process equipment.
• Labour needed can also be estimated per ton of
product. Because the relationship between labor
requirements and production rate is not always a linear
one, a 0.2 to 0.25 power of the capacity ratio when
plant capacities are scaled up or down, is often used.
• Table 22 shows the labour needed per ton of product.
Table 21 Typical labor requirements for process equipment

Type of equipment Workers/unit/shift

Dryer, rotary ½
Dryer, spray 1
Dryer, tray ½
Centrifugal separator ¼-½
Crystallizer, mechanical ¼
Filter, vacuum 1/8 – 1/4
Evaporator ¼
Reactor, batch 1
Reactor, continuous ½
Steam plant (100,000 lb/h) 3
•Because of new technological developments
including computerized controls and long-
distance control arrangements, the practice of
relating employee-hour requirements directly
to production quantities for a given product
can give inaccurate results unless very recent
data are used.
As a general rule of thumb, the labor requirements
being reasonable:
for a fluids-processing plant, such as an ethylene
oxide plant or others as shown in Table 22, would be
in the low range of 0.5 to 2 employee-hours per ton
of product;
for a solid-fluids plant, such as a polyethylene plant,
the labor requirement would be in the intermediate
range of 2 to 4 employee-hours per ton of product;
for plants primarily engaged in solids processing such
as a coal briquetting plant, the large amount of
materials handling would make the labor
requirements considerabIy higher than for other
types of plants with a range of 4 to 8 employee-hours
per ton of product.
• Another method of estimating labor requirements as a
function of plant capacity is based on adding up the
various principal processing steps on the flow sheets.
• In this method, a process step is defined as any unit
operation, unit process, or combination thereof, which
takes place in one or more units of integrated equipment
on a repetitive cycle or continuously, e.g., reaction,
distillation, evaporation, drying, filtration, etc.
• Once the plant capacity is fixed, the number of
employee-hours per step is obtained from Fig. 6-8 and
multiplied by the number of process steps to give the
total employee hours.
• Variations in labor requirements from highly automated
processing steps to batch operations are provided by
selection of the appropriate curve on Fig. 6-8.
FIGURE 6-8 Operating labor requirements for chemical process
industries.
Example Estimation of labor requirements.
Consider a highly automated processing plant having
a capacity of 100 tons/day of product and requiring
principal processing steps of heat transfer, reaction,
and distillation.
What are the average operating labor requirements
for an annual operation of 300 days?
Solution
The process plant is considered to require three
process steps. From Fig. 6-8, for a capacity of 100 tons
product/day, the highly automated process plant
requires 33 employee-hours/day/processing step.
Thus, for 300 days annual operation, operating labor
required = (3X33X300) = 29,700 employee-
hours/year.
• The data shown in Fig. 6-8 and Table 22, where
plant capacity and specific type of process are
taken into account, are much more accurate
than the preceding rule of thumb if the added
necessary information is available.

Direct Supervisory and Clerical Labor

• A certain amount of direct supervisory and
clerical labor is always required for a
manufacturing operation.
• The necessary amount of this type of labor is
closely related to the total amount of operating
labor, complexity of the operation, and product
quality standards.
For the given example, it needs operating labour of
33 employee-hours/day/processing step to
produce 100 tons/day product using highly
automated process with 3 process steps.
For process with 3 steps, the total direct operating
labour needed is:
33 X 3 = 99 employee-hours/day.
Since, a man can only be employed for 8 hours/day,
the man power needed for the plant is:
99/8 employee.
This is the man power needed to operate the plant
at any time, meaning the man power needed for
one shift (to continuously operate at 24 hr/day).
For 4 shifts available, with work time of 8
hrs/day for a shift, the total man power needed
to operate the plant is :
99/8 X 4 = 49.5 man  50 man.

As for indirect operating labour, it can be

estimated as normal need for the i.e.
administrative work, general purpose, security,
safety and environment, utility, and for
economics activities ( buying, selling, accounting,
etc).
Things to remember:
- A position will only be given if it neceessary
- When a position is given, the responsibility as
for subordinate, should be fair with other
position of the same level.

Make a plant organisation of certain chemical plant

(your choice), with a given capacity and process
flow sheet  home work. Try to work with 3
different ways to estimate operating labours
needed for the plant (using data from real plant,
Table 21, 22 and the graph proposed by Lang: Fig.6-
8 Peters). Assume any data neccessary for the
calculation/estimation.