Enhancing corporate value in the optimal design of chemical supply chains

The tight profit margins under which chemical process industries (CPI) operate are forcing companies to pay more and more attention to the design and operation of their supply chains (SCs). Traditional approaches available in the process systems engineering (PSE) literature to address the design and operation of chemical SCs usually focus on the process operations side and neglect the financial part of the problem. This work deals with the design and retrofit of chemical SCs and proposes a novel framework to address this problem that consists of incorporating financial considerations at the strategic decision-making level. Within this framework, the decisions that have a long-lasting effect on the firm are assessed through integrated models that are capable of holistically optimizing the combined effects of process operations and finances. The proposed approach adopts the corporate value of the firm (CV) as the objective to be maximized. The main advantages of such a holistic approach are highlighted through a case study, in which a comparison with the traditional biased method that pursues a fairly simple performance indicator as objective and disregards the financial variables and constraints of the problem is carried out. The integrated solution guarantees the feasibility of the strategic decisions from the financial point of view by ensuring liquidity control. Furthermore, it also leads to a superior economic performance as it exhibits a greater capacity of improving, the value of the firm.