"Honeywell’s priority throughout this entire project was customer satisfaction. They were concerned about our needs and demonstrated extreme devotion to us as a client. We were able to measure a one-year return on investment and increased sugar production due to Honeywell’s proven technology and service. As a result of the success of this project, we will expand our migration to Experion PKS at other factories."
Mevlut Gunaydin, Maintenance Manager, Konya Sugar
Konya Sugar needed to replace and upgrade its Siemens Teleperm M human machine interface (HMI) due to parts obsolescence and discontinuation of service support. Since the cost of migration from Teleperm M HMI to Siemens PCS7 HMI was too high, other alternatives were explored. Honeywell’s offer for replacing the entire distributed control system (DCS) including HMI was cheaper than the first alternative. According to Konya Sugar, Honeywell’s Experion ® Process Knowledge System (PKS) is the best process control system considering capacity, speed, capabilities and ease of configuration. Konya experienced the following benefits as a result of migrating to Experion:
Konya Sugar Inc. is the largest private sugar producer in Turkey and is considered the leader in beet production, sugar production, total income and productivity. Providing more than 30,000 beet growers with several opportunities, Konya Sugar supports various sectors, helping all benefit from low-cost sugar by focusing on productivity and customer satisfaction.
Konya Sugar has two sugar factories. The Konya sugar factory, built in 1954, has a daily beet processing capacity of 10,000 tons and daily sugar production of 1,500 tons. Built in 2004, the Cumra sugar factory has daily beet processing capacity of 12,000 tons and daily sugar production of 1,800 tons. Konya Sugar is planning to increase the number of factories by privatizing state-owned factories.
Konya Sugar realized that it had to look for a replacement system for its legacy Siemens Teleperm M HMI due to parts obsolescence and lack of support services. After investigating several upgrade options to replace the system, the company discovered that the best option was to replace not just the HMI, but the entire DCS.
"We expanded the scope of our project and looked at several companies including Honeywell, Siemens and Emerson," said Mevlut Gunaydin, Maintenance Manager, Konya Sugar. "We needed a solution that would provide complete sugar plant automation as well as support our sugar batch cooking program."
Konya Sugar selected Honeywell’s Experion system to help automate its factory operations. Experion is Honeywell’s single system for process, business and asset management.
"Honeywell is a professional company always focused on Konya’s complete satisfaction," said Gunaydin. "We were excited to update our technology and found Honeywell’s Experion easy to configure and very robust."
Konya Sugar was able to pinpoint specific figures relating to all parts of the sugar production process, including an increase of more than 17 percent in the sugar quality point process. This increase in sugar quality has led to an increase in sugar sales. The company was able to measure reductions in the sugar cooking time with some showing a 23 percent improvement and an annual cost reduction of more than €300,000.
Concluded Gunaydin, "The local Honeywell Turkey team strived to make sure and accomplish this project with the best quality, within the promised period and without compromising the sugar yield and quality along the campaign. They met that challenge and as a result, helped increase our sugar production while at the same time decreasing our production costs, resulting in a return on investment in just one year."