The AST Group and Honeywell Process Solutions have been awarded a multimillion dollar order from Aluminium Bahrain (ALBA) to provide a manufacturing execution system (MES) for the company's Line 5 expansion project.
ALBA is currently undergoing a plant expansion to increase production from 530 000 to 840 000 tonnes per annum with the construction of a new Potline-5. The MES will provide the new plant with state-of-the-art information technology to streamline data handling and enhance decision-making processes across the value chain for Line 5 plants comprising carbon, reduction and casthouse, as well as two upstream supply sectors being power and calciner.
The AST Group of South Africa has previously partnered with Honeywell to deliver consulting services for defining the MES and for implementing a total integrated production solution to ALBA. AST provides MES domain expertise in aluminium smelting and also enterprise resource planning (ERP) consulting, which will provide value added services to the supply of the MES - in which AST is a market leader for such services in South Africa. In AST, these are supplied by the IPS and ERP Solutions divisions.
"The combination of Honeywell's state-of-the-art technology and Aluminium Smelter focused implementation team was the most cost effective solution to help ALBA achieve its business vision. We firmly believe that this project will lead to productivity improvements at our site and help us realise our goal of being one of the lowest cost producers," said Peter Cowie, ALBA's general manager Line 5 Operations.
Both AST and Honeywell are providing skilled MES resources to the joint project, which will be managed as one team together with a BMS team from ALBA for delivering the MES using the Bussiness.Flex product suite of Honeywell and the production modules of SAP R/3 as the technology baselines.
Anton Rossouw, project engineer of the MES implementation said "The integrated standard products offer ALBA a lowest total cost of ownership when set against the classic bespoke solutions of the past. Our challenge now is to meet the business expectations within a very tight schedule set by the Line 5 commissioning programme. To achieve this we have assembled a strong team and merged the ALBA team with the Honeywell-AST team. The ALBA team members are directly linked to the business managers to ensure that two-way communications take place throughout the project. We recognise the critical need for user participation as they will become the owners."
The project is expected to be completed in March 2005.
For more information contact Carla Pattison, communications manager, AST 012 675 5681, [email protected], www.ast.co.za, www.acs.honeywell.com
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