Honeywell Announces Collaboration & Integration Platform for Process Industries

By Brandon Teoh

Honeywell is a 127 years old company and market leader in the aerospace, automation & control solutions, performance materials & technologies and transportation systems.

It prides itself with heavy focus on research and development activities, having employed over 19,000 scientists and engineers worldwide, 97 research and engineering facilities and been awarded with more than 30,000 patents worldwide.

Heavy rooted in the automation & control solutions as well as having the domain expertise in the mining, oil & gas and refining industries, Honeywell is able to identify key challenges that these industries are facing.

Collecting data on extreme conditions, implementing safety procedures, catering for reliable technology platforms and identifying standards were yesterday’s challenges. Of course, these challenges still exist in today’s environments but these had been common. Industry players these days are experiencing newer kind of challenges such as 1.) having more workloads arise from competitive pressure, 2.) getting real time, relevant and accurate information for complex decisions making, 3.) consolidation of technologies to yield better ROI and for business continuity.

As a result of such insights, Honeywell created an enterprise collaboration platform known as Intuitive Executive. This platform serves as an ecosystem for customers to anticipate, collaborate and act.

1. Anticipate – predict problems & identify opportunities in time to act on them
2. Collaborate – capture knowledge & share information and best practices for smarter, more agile decisions
3. Act – drive performance with workflows to ensure that knowledge is acted on

Essentially, by leveraging on this platform, customers get to:

• Visualise and act on data federated from multiple sources – anticipate
• Organise company’s knowledge to learn from experience – anticipate
• Enable remote operations & collaboration – collaborate
• Engage with experts as needed for maximum impact – collaborate
• Collaborate across function silos – collaborate
• Get data to decision faster – act
• Stop reinventing and start reusing – act

The Intuitive Executive therefore serves five core functions primarily:

1. Platform for collaboration
2. Platform for knowledgebase
3. Platform for data integration
4. Platform for monitoring
5. Platform for supply chain management

When asked about the core technologies behind Intuitive Excutive, Ashish Gaikwad, General Manager, Business Performance Solutions HPS commented that the building blocks are:

1. Microsoft technologies – MSSQL server, Sharepoint, StreamInsight
2. Data federation – is considered to be the newer concept for data warehousing. A federated database, or virtual database, is a composite of all constituent databases in a federated database system. There is no actual data integration as a result of data federation.
3. Data contextualisation – same data presented in different contexts for different users
4. Vendor neutrality integration platform powered by Matrikon

Intuitive Executive is a solution of big data for the process industries. It is a highly scalable and configurable platform and web based. A typical implementation would require consultation as pre-requisite.

Ashish Gaikwad, General Manager,  Business Performance Solutions HPS,  at the conference

Ashish Gaikwad, who was in KL in conjunction with Honeywell’s Business Optimisation Conference 2012, explained that it is high time now for process industries to implement such collaboration solution which also serves as a platform for big data and enterprise social media. A typical deployment would cost at least US $ 250,000. Industries such as retail, financial and FMCG were the early adopters of such technology as compared to the process industries.

The market opportunity is huge especially in Europe for oil & gas, Australia for mining and USA for refinery. Currently, two major customers in Europe are already using this system.

The critical success factors for Honeywell Process Solutions consist of two building blocks:

1. Technology
2. Domain expertise

According to Ashish, it currently employs about 150 domain experts who are stationed around the world serving as consultants for customers and projects.