Keops Isis Industrial Information Systems, a member of the JSE-listed Altech group, has recently completed a Master Plan for Environmental Management Systems at the Sasol Synthetic Fuels (SSF) complex in Secunda.
Sasol takes a proactive approach to environmental management and it is believed that the implementation of the resulting roadmap will set the standard for the rest of the industry in South Africa.
According to Gerhard Greeff, the Keops Isis consultant who performed the project, the Master Plan consisted of analysing the current and proposed operations processes to identify deficiencies, opportunities, gaps in current system architecture and required functionality to arrive at a comprehensive conceptual systems architecture that can enable the operations processes to increase effectiveness and efficiency, and to minimise environmental impact. "The Masterplan considered current and proposed legislation as well as world standards for environmental management and legislation. Specialists in this field were involved to achieve this objective," he said.
SSF identified the need to implement a Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) based system to motivate polluters to modify their behaviour and recover some of the costs imposed by the discharge on various parties. This principle has been identified as a potential driving force for further waste reduction as well as a tool to generate revenue for waste-site rehabilitation. To enable the effective implementation of the principle, information is required across environmental aspects, business, units and product streams, and integration with business and production systems is critical.
Greeff said the Master Plan focused on environmental aspects such as water (surface and subterranean), waste (liquid, solid, hazardous and non-hazardous) and air (ambient quality and process emissions) management and control. "One of the major influencing factors of the design was the requirement of scalability to enable the incorporation of Safety, Health, Risk and Quality in the future. The proposed architecture also had to fit into the Enterprise Wide Systems (EWS) architecture plan for SSF that includes two major system concepts, the Integrated Business System and Integrated Production Solutions."
The Master plan contains a roadmap for systems implementation projects for a period of 3-5 years around the common goal of achieving total systems integration and maximum enablement of the environmental management functions of SSF. The roadmap consists of standard off-the-shelf products as far as possible indicating what integration, re-configuration and phasing is required to achieve the overall business objective of an integrated environmental management system. "It also took cognisance of the EWS implementation roadmap, ensuring that no duplication of functionality occurs and that the implementation efforts are synchronised," said Greeff.
Keops Isis has also successfully completed Master Plans in the Metals Refinery and Metals Smelting industries.
With its headquarters in Centurion, Keops Isis is active in SA as well as a number of Southern African countries, boasting large clients in the metals, minerals and petrochemical industries.
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