Omnia Fertilizer produces and trades in granular, liquid and specialty fertilizers. The fertilizer plant at Sasolburg installed the PI System in 2013, to provide greater visibility into plant operations from virtually anywhere. The PI System forms an integral part of the emerging MES and Operational Intelligence capability at Omnia. As the PI System is also a market-leading real-time infrastructure it ensures that the solution is built upon a continuously evolving architecture. Although the main focus for now is on MES and data visibility, future phases will leverage the powerful PI Event frames. In this presentation Yashin will describe the steps in their implementation, some of the interesting events that happened in the process, the initial benefits that are now being realized, as well as their plans for the future.
Speaker
Yashin Parsard
Mr. Yashin Parsard graduated from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa with a BSc (Elec) Eng degree in 1990. He has worked as a consultant for most of his career in the process automation and MES space. He has performed work at over 30 sites in South Africa using products from various vendors in the process control space. Three years ago he took a permanent position at Omnia Fertilizer as the Technology Manager for MES and was tasked with the responsibility of creating an MES capability. Within a short period of time he introduced the PI System infrastructure at the main site at Sasolburg and together with Microsoft SharePoint this has become the foundation upon which the MES capability is being built. All integration, development and support is performed in-house with a team that has now grown to four.