Sales

The Sales page allows you to enter pricing information and demand limits for the sold materials. From the Sales page it is possible to edit the sales configuration for products and utilities.

Products are the actual final materials that a plant produces and sells. Each product is associated with a material specification which defines the property limits required for that product. Products also have associated sale prices, and may have limits set on the amount required for sale. For example, the jet fuel material specification defines the smoke point, viscosity and aromatics limits required for producing saleable jet fuel.

Products may be straight-run materials produced in the plant, but are more likely the result of blending several different streams together. These streams may be straight-run streams, or the output from different process units. For example, gasoline may be produced by blending straight-run light naphtha with reformate and hydrotreated heavy naphtha. The blend recipe may be fixed, or is more likely optimized to meet the material specification associated with the particular gasoline product. The different streams that can be blended into a product are defined using the Blending Matrix.

A product of a plant may be sold into particular markets. If no market is associated with a sale, the material can go to a global pool of sales material.

The following views are available for the Sales grid from the View list in the Grid group of the Home ribbon tab:

• Default: Shows the most commonly used columns.

• All: Shows all columns.

• Infeasibility Breakers: Contains a column to activate infeasibility breakers associated with each product. For this to have an effect, infeasibility breakers must be enabled for the optimization.

• Reference Density: Contains a column for the product reference density to be entered for weight/volume price or amount conversions. If no reference density is entered, the actual density of the product is used.

  When a material with a weight-based price has a reference density, the price is converted to volume basis (using the reference density) and the sale occurs in volume basis.

  Example: Imagine a sale of 10 kt of regular gasoline with a density of 0.75. If the price of the material is 500 $/tonne, the sale value is 5 M$ (10 * 500/1000).
  However, if the sale has a reference density of 0.7 entered then the effective price becomes 350 $/m3 (500 * 0.7). The sale also occurs in volume terms, so the sales volume is 13,333.33 m3 (10/0.75 * 1000). Thus the sale value is only 4.67 M$ (13.33 * 350/1000).

Add products

To add products to the Sales grid:

1. Click Add Product in the Products group of the Home ribbon tab. A row is added to the grid.

2. In the new row, double click in the Material Type column and edit the material type to associate with the product.

   Materials are grouped together according to their lowest level in the material type hierarchy to which they are assigned.

   Example: If regular gasoline and premium gasoline both have the material type gasoline they are grouped, but if regular gasoline has a material type regular gasoline and premium gasoline has a material type premium gasoline they are not grouped: even though both of these material types are children of gasoline, they are at a lower level in the hierarchy.

3. Choose the Grade of the product.

4. Enter the Price of the product, unless you are using a .

5. If needed, enter a reference density for the product.

6. Enter any Minimum, Maximum or Fixed constraints for the amount of material being sold.

   If you enter a minimum or a fixed constraint, you can also activate a Threshold. When an item has a threshold applied, the amount must then be either zero or at least the minimum amount. For example, you could define a threshold on the sale of premium gasoline of 150 kbbl. The valid solution would be either zero or 150 kbbl or more. That is, it would be impossible to sell 120 kbbl of gasoline, but 155 kbbl would be feasible.

After you have added the new product, in the flowsheet select the streams to be blended in the product, choose Send To > Sales from the context menu and select the material just added from the list of available materials (see Send Streams for Sale for more information).

After you optimize the case, you can see the Solution value for each active sale, and the and the Marginal value for any constraints that were applied.

You must have add permissions for feedstocks to add materials to the Sales table.

If using per-period constraints for product sales, be sure to correctly set the associated period length on the Inventories page.

Delete products

To delete products from the Sales grid:

7. Select the products you want to delete.

8. Do either of the following:

   • Click Delete Product in the Products group of the Home ribbon tab.

   • Right-click on the selected products and choose Delete Product from the context menu.

9. Click Yes in the confirmation dialog. The selected products are deleted.

Note: Deleting a product from the Sales table does not delete the associated grade sale. Sales should be removed by deleting the associated grade sale.

Price tranches

Products and utilities may be purchased with different price tranches, that is, different prices for the same material, each price with its own set of sale criteria.

Example: A refinery may have a long term contract to sell gasoline to a particular retailer with a set price, while also selling the same product on the open market with a different price. This represents a sale of the same material, but with different pricing.

To add a price tranche in the Sales tab:

10. Select the product to add a tranche for.

11. Click Add Tranche in the Products group of the Home ribbon tab, or right click the selected row and choose Add Tranche from the context menu. A new row is added to the grid.

12. Edit the name for the tranche in the Name column. Make sure the Active check box is selected if you want the tranche to be active.

13. Choose the Grade associated with the tranche.

14. Enter the Price of the material, and the corresponding UoM.

15. If needed, enter the reference density of the material, with unit of measure. To see the reference density columns, the View in the Grid group of the Home ribbon tab must be set to Reference Density.

16. Enter any constraints on the amount of material to be sold (Minimum, Maximum or Fixed) and the corresponding UoM.

17. Optionally, enter a Priority for the tranche. If you set a priority, ensure that the tranche has no active minimum or fixed constraints, and the solution is not locked.

Tip: A price tranche (slice) is used for setting differential pricing within a single case analysis. If you wish to compare pricing across different scenarios, then different prices should be set in different cases.

Exclude a material sale from a case

In each of the two tabs of the Sales page (Sales and Utilities), each material eligible for sale has a check box under the Active column. To prevent a material from being sold when optimizing a case, without having to delete the material from the Sales page, you can clear the corresponding check box.

You can also enter zero in the Fixed column to constrain the amount being sold.

Warning: When you set a product to have a fix of zero, you must make sure that there are other destinations for that product's components to be routed, or that it is possible not to make the product's constituents, otherwise the problem will be infeasible.
For example, imagine you make jet fuel by sending straight-run kerosene to sales as jet fuel, and kerosene cannot be routed elsewhere. If you set the sale of jet to be zero, then there is no place for straight-run kerosene to go and so the problem is infeasible.

When a sale is deactivated during optimization (by clearing the Active check box), the sale amount is fixed to zero with a price of zero. Existing pricing and demand amounts remain visible within the grid. For the associated grade the product specifications are also not included within the optimization problem. Deactivated sales will not report marginal values. To obtain marginal values, you need to keep the sale active and manually fix the sale to zero.

Tip: Disable grades which are not currently being produced. For example, you may model summer, intermediate and winter gasoline within your model. In summer disable the winter and intermediate grades to prevent their production.

Show differences with the parent case

Whenever a value in the row is different from the value in the parent case within the model, the unnamed column next to the Active column shows a double arrow icon () . Note that this column may not be present in all views.

The Deltas group of the Home ribbon tab lets you further manage these differences:

• Click the Show button to display a blue triangle icon in the top right corner of every cell whose value overrides the value in the parent case. This allows you to pinpoint the specific cells with overridden values, rather than whole rows.

  • A dark blue triangle means that the value is different from the parent case value.

  • A light blue triangle means that the value is the same as in the parent case, but has been entered manually, so it is still treated as an override. Future changes in the parent case value will not be reflected in the subcase value.

    

• Click Restore to change the values of the selected cells back to those of the parent case. You can also right click and choose Restore from the context menu.

  Tip: To show all the differences between cases within a model, see Compare Cases.
  To merge differences across cases, see Update Cases.