Sasol Synthetic Fuels has commissioned Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions along with technology partners the AST Group and Facilitated Integration Technologies (FIT) to design, implement, commission and maintain a world-class integrated production solution (IPS) across its gas production, gas circuit, fuels, utilities, water and ash, and market and process integration production units. The initiative forms part of Sasol's aggressive drive to further enhance its status as a global player in the petrochemical industry, part of which entails integrating production information systems across all Sasol companies within the Secunda complex in order to achieve world class status in manufacturing excellence. The IPS project will span two to three years and is valued at US$12m.
Sasol has evolved over 50 years to become one of the largest and most successful South African companies. With an employee base of around 30 000 and attributable earnings of R4003m during 2000, the organisation is a major contributor to socio-economic development in the region. Sasol Synthetic Fuels (SSF), a major subsidiary within the Sasol Group, produces synthetic fuels, pipeline gas and a wide variety of petrochemical feedstocks at Secunda for Sasol Chemical Industries, as well as the South African chemical and polymer industry.
Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions was selected for the project by virtue of its thorough understanding of the synthetic fuels business, its long standing relationship with Sasol, possession of the appropriate technology platform and its ability to put together a team capable of delivering an integrated solution of this complexity. JSE-listed IT company, AST, was selected as a partner by Honeywell on the basis of their reputation and sound track record in the implementation of manufacturing execution systems (MES). "The partnership between AST and Honeywell leverages the wealth of IT experience that AST has in the Industrial arena with the world-class petrochemical technology that Honeywell delivers to SASOL," says Derick Knoll, CEO of AST's MSI. International consultants FIT were selected because of their impressive experience in the field of information systems in the hydrocarbon and petrochemical industries.
Information only has value if it can be turned into knowledge...
"A complex operation like Sasol Synthetic Fuels generates vast amounts of information. But this information only has value if it can be turned into knowledge, which can then in turn be utilised to enable better, faster decision making. This is the ultimate objective of the IPS project - the benefits of shortening the decision making cycle are vast and we conservatively estimate that the project will have a payback period of less than one year," says Johan La Grange, Sasol Executive Sponsor for the project.
"Honeywell has a long-standing, and often ground-breaking, technology partnership with Sasol and, like many projects before it, IPS is a world first in terms of the extent of the applications and the degree of integration required. As is often the case, to achieve Sasol's world-class objective we will be pushing hard against the boundaries of existing technology," adds Stefan Oberholtzer, Director of Honeywell Southern Africa.
World-class information solution
Sasol's brief to Honeywell for IPS embodies the design and implementation of a world-class integrated production information solution that will exploit the organisation's existing investment wherever possible. By definition, world-class means that the proposed solution must be in line with the concepts and technologies utilised internationally by the top ten companies in the petrochemical industry and in line with Sasol's own excellence drive.
The current system in operation at Sasol Synthetic Fuels utilises point solutions with a limited degree of integration and with an inherent duplication of data in multiple places. The new IPS project will streamline operations by removing the need for duplication and by providing a fundamental level of integration between the organisation's base infrastructure and critical business processes like planning, scheduling, blending; production management; operations monitoring, and a number of other ancillary business processes.
Business fundamentals before technical solution
At the heart of the new technical solution will be Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions' Uniformance solution suite, with its associated Business.Flex applications. Uniformance enables better management of plant operations and improved financial performance through the integration of business and control information. However, Stefan Oberholtzer is quick to point out that the project philosophy is first and foremost to supply a practical business solution to Sasol's information requirements and not simply to apply technology. "A project of this complexity requires going back to the fundamentals of the business processes, understanding them in every detail, and even re-engineering them if our analysis indicates that this is necessary. Once this foundation is correct, the technology then enables us to implement the optimal integrated technology solution," he says.
Sasol followed this approach from project inception, with the first step being the identification of high-level initiatives in an opportunity assessment that was completed in 2000. This assessment identified a number of 'first win' initiatives which will be implemented in parallel with the detailed business analysis and solution design phase of the project, to ensure that Sasol benefits from the value of the project as soon as possible.
Total project completion is envisaged for early to mid-2003.
Honeywell Southern Africa
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