Aluminium giant uses business intelligence tools to help avoid unnecessary plant downtime

Too many unscheduled plant downtime and subsequent production catch-ups can not only cost KwaZulu-Natal-based aluminium smelter Hillside Aluminium millions of rands in terms of lost production and productivity, but also an equivalent amount in electricity penalty costs.

With power usage said to exceed that of a city the size of Port Elizabeth, being able to operate within the long-term supply contract negotiated with electricity utility, Eskom, is crucial. This is one of the reasons Hillside depends so much on being able to extract and analyse business reports and data quickly and easily from its plant maintenance computing system.

"Plant maintenance is a fine balancing act whereby you don't want to schedule preventative maintenance too early nor too late. Either way it costs you unnecessarily," says Steve Phaup, branch manager at Synergy Computing, the business intelligence specialists that supplied and support the Cognos-based solution at Hillside.

"It is one key area of a business where you can make substantial cost savings by operating at peak efficiencies. This is especially true in aluminium processing, where the cost ramifications of plant downtime can be huge."

Hillside began using Cognos PowerPlay and Impromptu business intelligence tools soon after it discovered its SAP enterprise system, implemented seven years ago, was not capable of giving it the plant maintenance reports needed to achieve these peak efficiencies.

"Cognos was the best solution available then and was very easy to implement," says Tony Hendry, reporting specialist, maintenance control at Hillside Aluminium.

"As end-users in the Plant Maintenance department we can easily extract data out of the SAP Oracle database and view it in any manner we want to. We can pick up exceptions immediately and drill down into the data to see precisely what's happening. By getting a better picture quickly, we're able to pick up problems immediately."

About 25 Hillside managers and maintenance staff currently use the systems' reporting and graphics capabilities to track plant reliability and availability, allowing them do in minutes what it used to take several hours to accomplish. "There's no doubt that a similar plant not using Cognos tools to extract data and generate reports would take at least a week to do what I can do in two to three hours," says Hendry. With the Cognos system now providing plant maintenance all the reporting functionality it needs, Hendry is now looking to expand the use of Cognos to other business processes.

He has already built reporting solutions for the company's warehouse and purchasing departments to keep staff totally in touch with what is happening in their environments. The systems provide reports such as orders outstanding or not processed. Also, management can see precisely where money is being spent and on what products.

By reporting on inventory values and stock levels, the system is able to provide early warning if key products drop below key re-order levels so that ordering processes can be activated or orders generated automatically. "By having such systems in place we're able to ensure we have the equipment and spares necessary to avoid downtime," concludes Hendry.