YOKOGAWA IS strengthening its worldwide Industrial Automation (IA) business as it spearheads its ambitious strategy to become a global leader within three years.
A key component of Yokogawa's global success is the dramatic increase in business in the highly competitive IA market of the Middle East underpinned by its leadership in measurement, control and information systems.
Yokogawa established its Middle East headquarters at Bahrain in 1990 to facilitate easy access to the growing network of sales, engineering and service facilities throughout the region.
Yokogawa Middle East (YME) has continued to strengthen its service and sales activities to meet increasing demand from the fast growing markets of the GCC states and the wider Middle East.
Significantly, YME became one of the regional headquarters and a key worldwide facility for global Yokogawa in early 2006 reflecting the growing importance of the Middle East.
YME is now aligned with its European, American and South East Asian counterparts as a global facility in order to enhance and increase the scale and range of IA solutions provided on a local basis throughout the Middle East.
The Yokogawa name has stood for quality, reliability and innovation for almost a century with a deeply rooted commitment firmly embedded in YME and its subsidiaries.
According to a spokesman for YME, Yokogawa's growth in IA business has increased more than four-fold over the last five years in the Middle East.
YME is the regional headquarters with multicultural professional workforce specialised in various functions.
Currently, YME employs over 338 staff in sales, engineering and technical support deployment in strategic locations throughout the region.
Local Partnership
Moreover, Yokogawa is increasing its presence across the region from its Middle East headquarters in Bahrain plus operational offices in Jubail, Al Khobar and Yanbu for Saudi Arabia; and Abu Dhabi, Dubai (Jebel Ali), Muscat, Doha and Tehran.
Yokogawa has taken advantage of Bahrain's strategic location not only for its ease of access to the region but as a global centre of excellence in the provision of technology and service support.
Since Yokogawa moved its Middle East representative office from Kuwait to Bahrain in May 1990, the operation has gone from strength to strength with a staff of 265 including all nationalities.
In Bahrain, YME is expanding its Sitra facilities in terms of its Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) and Staging facilities expansion including FAT 2 at 600 sqm; FAT 3 at 800sqm; and work is in progress for FAT 4 at 1,200 sqm.
In between FAT 3 and FAT 4 Yokogawa is refurbishing a building with storage and offices. With this level of FAT expansion including a staging area YME is gearing up to handle larger projects.
To meet increasing business demand and to provide technical resources to the wider region, however Yokogawa has also invested in establishing new companies in other countries.
In April 2006, Yokogawa Engineering Middle East FZE started operations in Jebel Ali Free Zone. From this location Yokogawa is executing seven projects; three in the UAE, and one in Oman, Egypt, Yemen and Iran.
The oil, gas, petrochemical, and power markets in the Middle East are growing fast with increasing investments in these markets, leveraging from the revenues resulting from higher oil prices.
Despite strong international competition, YME has succeeded in gaining the confidence of its customers thanks to the high reliability of Yokogawa products and the professionalism of its employees.
The Yokogawa workforce comprises engineers specialized in various instrumentation fields. Most projects are locally managed and executed by its staff, including engineering, commissioning, startup and training.
The activities of YME cover Sales and Engineering Services embracing Project Management, Supply, Site Services, Training and Maintenance of Integrated Process Automation Systems, Process Control Instruments and Test and Measuring Instruments.
Yokogawa aims to increase its efficiency through three initiatives, namely, customer-centric solutions, leading edge technology and One global Yokogawa.
Global Leadership
The parent company, Yokogawa Electric Corporation, was founded in Japan in 1915. From the company's beginnings as a producer of electrical measuring instruments, Yokogawa has been steadfast to its goal of applying leading edge technology to support industry to operate production facilities more efficiently.
Yokogawa worldwide employs more than 18,000 people in a global network of 18 manufacturing facilities, 83 affiliate companies, and over 650 sales and engineering offices in 28 countries worldwide.
With more than $3.6 billion in sales, Yokogawa is committed to applying state-of-the- art technology in the company's three main divisions of industrial automation, test and measurement and information systems, including aviation and industry support.
Yokogawa's commitment to innovation is reflected in the company's exceptionally high ration of investment in R&D, which enables the sustained development of pioneering new technologies, products and services.
Yokogawa Takes the Lead in Refinery Applications
MODERN OPTIMISATION techniques are challenging organisations to rethink the way they conduct business both internally and externally and how efficiently and effectively their entire supply chain is managed.
When looking at general workflow in a refinery it is immensely complex at a multitude of levels, from decision-making and planning levels, operation and control, safety, laboratory measurements and plant maintenance.
Unless and until there is a perfect harmony and co-ordination between all departments and functions, there will be inefficiency in terms of performance and profitability.
The need and scope for optimisation is so vast in a refinery that it is essential to use automation tools not only to arrive at the best plan, but also to quickly evaluate the new optimum with internal or external changes in the business scenario.
However, in today's refinery environment, data acquisition, simulation and optimisation tools often reside in "islands" in different groups across the refinery.
This results in various local and plant-level only, not the most profitable refinery-wide optimisation. A holistic view via an integrated model of the refinery is required to give refinery planners the ability to evaluate opportunities optimally, accurately and quickly.
Yokogawa being one of the pioneers in process automation realise this more than any other contemporary players and provide a plant wide automation solution encompassing:
- APC and Optimisation;
- Asset management system;
- Production control system;
- Field sensing and actuation;
- Refinery offsite solutions;
- Alarm management system;
- Safety instrumented system;
- Analytical systems; and
- Training Simulation.
All of the above products and solutions are well integrated over a high speed backbone real time network to enable management of production output, product quality, and process performance monitoring, and provide integrated modules for blending, product movement control, and material management—delivering the industry's leading solution for control, optimisation, and reporting in oil refineries.
Yokogawa delivered about 1,000 projects in refineries world wide with more than 100 systems for control of crude units, 150 systems for distillation units and more than 200 offsite applications. Many of these projects were delivered to refineries owned by oil majors like Shell, Chevron, Total etc. In Japan, Yokogawa enjoys about 76 per cent market share. And their Middle East refinery share include solutions provided to
- Bahrain: Bapco;
- Saudi Arabia: Sasref;
- Saudi Arabia: Refineries in Riyadh, Jeddah and Rabigh;
- Saudi Arabia: Luberef 1 & 2;
- UAE: ENOC;
- Oman: ORC and Sohar refinery; and
- Egypt: Assiut Petroleum Refinery, Cairo Oil Refinery, El-Nsr Petroleum, Suez Petroleum and Alexandria Petroleum.
Voices from many users given below hold strong testimony to the supremacy of Yokogawa in refinery automation.
Reliability
1) "Yokogawa DCS system has given excellent service since start-up, with no refinery downtime being attributable to control system problems." – Shell Refining Australia Pty Ltd Geelong Refinery
2) "Yokogawa DCS system has established its 'rock solid' availability so that we may begin to consider various improvements though APC and other advanced capabilities." – US Major Refinery
3) OMS project team of Shell has identified Yokogawa as a committed and reliable supplier. (Shell/Singapore)
Application Knowledge
4) "With the introduction of Yokogawa's APC system, the productivity of our plant in increasing. The operating rate of this APC system is almost 100 per cent and we rely on it very much. It is indispensable to our operation." – Fuji Oil Company, Ltd Sodegaura Refinery
5) "There are few people in the world who understand and provide solutions for the offsite automation problems. And, the best of them are with Yokogawa." – Total Antwerp Refinery
6) Yokogawa is the only OMS supplier in the world who listens to user's problem and provide solutions. (Caltex/Thailand)
Lifetime Partnership
7) "Within our refinery that is the most complex in southwest Europe, we have been using the Centum family of DCS since 1984. Throughout this period our system evolved from a basic DCS to the latest generation Centum CS 3000 integrated with MIS and APC. In the current situation we still have parts of the initial system running, though fully integrated with the latest technology. Additionally, I am happy to say that all these implementations did not affect shutdown schedules at any time." – Hellenic Petroleum Aspropyrgos Refinery
Conclusion
As refiners strive for further productivity improvements and a tighter commitment to HSE issues, they are adopting best practices.
Yokogawa's 50-year history of refining application know-how can help refineries adopt these best practices to operate efficiently under increasing challenging constraints.
