EGA's innovative employees shine at Ideas.America awards

The company's active approach to innovation has seen UAE-based aluminium giant Emirates Global Aluminium's ("EGA") win five awards - including two Gold awards - at the Ideas.America International Competition, held in Colorado, USA from 16 to 18 September 2014.

This success is a continuation of the company's proud record at the Ideas.America awards. All five of its shortlisted suggestions in this year's competition -which came from its highly-successful employee suggestion scheme - won awards.

EGA is the jointly-owned aluminium conglomerate formed by Mubadala Development Corporation and Investment Corporation of Dubai that combines the businesses of Dubai Aluminium PJSC (" DUBAL ") and Emirates Aluminium Company Limited PJSC (" EMAL "). Although this is the first time EGA took part as a company, its DUBAL subsidiary won a total of 27 Ideas.America awards between 2006 and 2013. This year, nominations came from both the DUBAL (Jebel Ali) and EMAL (Al Taweelah) sites.

The winning suggestions and their associated awards were:

• "Hopper lip repair made faster and safer", by Max Martonito and Robert Sotaso of Jebel Ali (Smelter Maintenance) - Gold Award for Safety Idea of the Year.
• "Reduce frequent failure of cooler bridge fan motors", by Firoj Kumar Meher, Sreekumar Sreedharan and Bala Subramaniam of Al Taweelah (Carbon Plant) - Gold Award for Team Idea of the Year.
• "Fe chute modification", by Muhammad Shafique, Tufail Khan and John Peter Leano of Al Taweelah (Carbon Plant) - Silver Award for Green Idea of the Year.
• "In-house design and fabrication of vacuum cleaner for potlines", by Leyson Ecuacion, Reynaldo Subong and Chandran Ullas Potekate of Al Taweelah (Reduction Maintenance) - Silver Award for Idea of the Year.
• "Programmable Logic Control ("PLC") Test Rig", by Senen Malacaste, Clark Jay Daroy, Jimmy Seraspe and Abraham Thomas of Jebel Ali (Smelter Maintenance) - Bronze Award for Idea of the Year.

EGA also won three awards in the Ideas.America Statistical Awards category, whereby the performance of a company's employee involvement programme is evaluated in various areas and compared against other companies' programmes. The accolades were: Performance Excellence (Gold); SEER Award for Performance Excellence (Gold) for 100% employee participation; and SEER Award for Savings per 100 Eligible Employees (Bronze).

A delighted Abdulla Kalban (Managing Director & CEO of EGA), said the company's success at the awards highlighted a deep-seated culture of innovation. "One of EGA's values is PERFORM, which talks strongly to excelling in operations through continuous improvement and innovation. Value adding-innovation has been a tradition at DUBAL since inception. It was adopted by EMAL and has carried on in EGA," he said.

The Ideas.America Association (formerly known as the USA Employee Involvement Association) has been in existence for 70 years and is a non-profit service organization composed of members from all over the world in various sectors such as finance, commerce, industry and government. The association is dedicated to the worth, contributions and benefits of employee ideas and innovation systems, and other employee involvement processes.