“With Honeywell we were able to benefit from a service provider that knows our business, our culture, our needs and abilities, and thus tailors solutions that enhance customer satisfaction but minimize overhead. The portfolio of products and services available from Honeywell allows Aughinish to operate at the bleeding edge of alumina refinery operations.”
George Troy, DCS Team Leader, Aughinish Alumina
In order to thrive in its highly competitive market, Aughinish Alumina constantly strives to develop and implement the latest technology and efficiency improvements to reduce operating costs, meet stringent environmental targets, and increase operator and asset effectiveness. Aughinish’s continuing success and viability is largely due to its ability to leverage new technology and R&D.
Aughinish has had a partnership with Honeywell since the opening of its plant in 1983. In 2004, Honeywell became a strategic partner for automation and control solutions.
The implementation of Honeywell’s Experion® Process Knowledge System (PKS) has helped the company experience many benefits:
Aughinish Alumina is an alumina refinery located on Aughinish Island, 20 miles downstream from Limerick City on Ireland’s west coast. The plant, the largest of its kind in Europe, began alumina production on a 1,000-acre site in 1983 and now produces over 1.8 million tons of alumina per annum with more than 480 employees.
Aughinish Alumina relies on Experion to help improve business and process agility.
Aughinish seeks to constantly improve its business processes and maximize competitive advantages. “Operating from a first-world location brings its own business pressures,” said George Troy, DCS Team Leader, Aughinish Alumina. “We looked at all our strategic partners and narrowed our relationships to key strategic partnerships to help focus on both business and process agility.” Aughinish chose Honeywell as its strategic automation partner to help enhance and grow the company’s automation assets in order to maximize performance. According to Troy, there were two fundamental reasons that Aughinish selected Honeywell as its automation solution provider. First, Honeywell has proven technology, experience and a growing solutions portfolio. Second, the automation business is very strategic to Honeywell’s core business.
Aughinish wanted to dramatically increase its knowledge base and its ability to make decisions more quickly based on this knowledge, saving both time and money in the process.
“We were looking for a way to continually develop our people, deploy our assets effectively and access timely information to make the right decisions at the right time. Aughinish has always been an early adopter of technology in order to gain competitive advantage,” said Troy.
Honeywell identified solutions that would help Aughinish optimize plant performance. Aughinish uses several Honeywell products including alarm management solutions and wireless technologies to help stay ahead of the competition. Other technologies include Digital Video Manager™ with integrated security to meet stringent codes on port security, advanced control algorithms to improve performance and advanced control technology on plant utilities to introduce effective and robust control. Honeywell tools such as Alarm Scout and Loop Scout™ allow Aughinish engineers to focus on the issues rather than lose valuable time searching for them. As the relationship matured, Honeywell embedded its employees into the Aughinish refinery under a European Union knowledge transfer arrangement to help with immediate problem identification and resolution with one single point of contact managing the entire process.
“Our success is measured by the number of tons of alumina produced. This has continued to grow thanks to our ability to gain visibility into our processes, thus becoming more efficient, productive and plant alert,” said Troy. “Honeywell has expanded its onsite solutions to include anti-scaling flow meters, fire and security solutions, IT network solutions, remote solutions and enhanced control solutions.”
Aughinish has also benefited from Honeywell’s workforce and infrastructure commitment, allowing the company to deliver local engineering resources. Working in a team environment has allowed Aughinish to focus on many sectors of technology at the plant including process control, safety management, operator effectiveness tools and plant security.
“Honeywell has been a key enabler allowing us to close the loop on the data, information, knowledge wisdom cycle thus allowing Aughinish to prosper,” concluded Troy. “The continuation of user groups, training seminars and cross-pollination of customer successes enables us to continually improve our core business.”
Experion® is a registered trademark of Honeywell International Inc. Loop Scout™ and Digital Video Manager™ are trademarks of Honeywell International Inc