Fives’ digital innovations to support the aluminium industry- By Sofiane Haddad, Digital services – Fives Aluminium division

Despite the lockdown situation, travel restrictions and various government policies in response to the COVID-19 situation, Aluminium producers have to carry out their activities, while following strict health protocols. In response to this unprecedented situation and thanks to our well-rounded worldwide organization, Fives’ Services teams are breaking new ground to continue supporting clients operations.

At the beginning of lockdown, our teams first used the digital tools they were familiar with, in order to answer clients’ requests without requiring any physical action. Then, capitalizing on our global presence, Fives’ experts designed dedicated digital solutions to ensure the continuity and quality of services. Constantly in touch, our Front-offices teams located all around the world, close to the customers’ sites, and the Back-office support teams in France are working together to provide peace of mind to our clients!

As an example in Bahrain, Fives Services Gulf, with the support of Fives experts from France, organized remote technical expertise in less than one week. The experts’ principal duty was to inspect an ECL Furnace Tending Assembly installed on-site. This intervention was challenging in many ways, but quite fruitful and demonstrated the ability of the Fives’ teams to develop innovative solutions based on digital technologies. In Asia, Fives experts have logged-on via a web interface in order to be able to remotely monitor the process parameters of the recently commissioned Firing Control System. After some adjustments, they could follow in real-time the evolution of the parameters on the local operators’ screen, allowing them to supervise the process performance of the production.

In Norway, a Fives expert provided the client with remote process assistance to optimize the operation of a recently commissioned Green Anode Plant. In China, a Fives technician went to the site to operate a filter repair work at customer’s Green Anode Plant. The operation was prepared and supervised remotely successfully by an expert from France.
These assignments are part of Fives’ commitment to support clients even more closely by using remote assistance solutions and thus ensuring optimum aluminium production everywhere.

At Fives, we are now firmly convinced that remote assistance will be more used in the future. In this health crisis situation, we were obliged to quickly change our ways of supporting clients, which allowed us to understand how powerful and efficient remote assistance solutions can be. Knowing that digital technologies are available almost all over the world, it must, therefore, be our task to exploit and promote to a greater extent the potential of these tools to support aluminium production. Not only allowing us to enhance our reactivity and availability while following social distancing, these tools also help us to assert ourselves as a major player in environmental commitments in the post-COVID-19 world, by minimizing as much as possible the flow of people around the world.

This period clearly showed that remote assistance is a relevant way to provide OEM expertise to clients. Now we accelerate the development of a full range of Remote services to increase our flexibility in a constantly evolving sector. Our vision is that Remote Assistance constitutes the next generation of services, for which Fives is ready to mobilize a comprehensive set of technologies and experts. Far beyond the simple use of devices like AR lenses, it is about the ability to deliver value to floor-operations, which comes with secured IT technologies on one hand (remote accesses to networks, equipment, dedicated devices…) and on another hand, with the provision of expertise, through a global network of experts and their access to relevant information.

Our new brand, Fives Remote Services, has for raison d’être to position Fives as a reliable key services partner combining expertise and operational excellence to provide the optimal service delivery. Among these services, we propose e-learning and webinars to keep operators skills at the best level through various Fives training modules, remote training in simulator allowing operators to evolve in a virtual & personalized environment to get the most out of your assets, remote solutions enabling with connected devices to get access to an OEM expertise anywhere at any time. We have also developed OEM-customer matchmaking tools such as Fives Connect, our brand new services portal that invites our customers to a smooth journey through a single online platform, privileged access to numerous digital services. Not only offering to each client its own secured interface, Fives Connect manages our brand new interactive and personalized bill of the material display, allowing maintenance teams to find relevant information, anywhere at any time. Fives’ SMARTCrane, another Fives Connect function, allows monitoring the process cranes fleet performance in real-time, through remote data visualization. By providing access to critical incidents to anticipate maintenance operations Fives is now shifting from reactive support to pro-active assistance.

In addition to this brand new range of services, Fives can also help its customers to optimize their costs through process optimization solutions, requiring little CAPEX. We have developed several digital tools allowing our clients, with our support, to optimize their process and equipment operation to result in lower operating costs.

They include advanced measurement tools for anode production performance monitoring such as the new ECL Smart on the Fly Inspection and Analysis (SOFIA) system, measuring the process parameters of conveyed butts in the Anode Rodding Shop (Volume/Shape, Distance/Diameter, Colour, etc.), or the ECL™ Instantaneous Measurement of the Anode Electrical Resistance (MIREA) system, a new solution to improve the anode production quality.  

These tools are part of the Fives comprehensive approach to monitor and optimize Process and Equipment throughout the whole anode life cycle: the AMELIOS suite.

Featuring technologies such as the Binder optimizer (fine PSD Monitoring & Control) to improve the anode quality, Vision-based identification and inspection systems to get a digital signature of the anode while visually reproducing it, the AMELIOS Suite manages a number of functions dedicated to raw, baked and consumed anodes (Flue wall monitoring, rod & stub analyser…). By collecting all the Anode data from traditional Level 1 & Level 2 systems, including properties from our other sensors (MIREA, SOFIA, etc.), the AMELIOS Suite constitutes an ultimate solution for a fully-digital carbon chain.

Alongside environment, The Industry 4.0 was already one of the Fives’ main concerns, it is now fully integrated as our new way of working. Connectivity added to proximity!