“He’s someone we trust,” states Gerald Bru, senior control systems specialist at the Equistar Chemicals plant in Corpus Christi, Texas, about his Honeywell “Triple S” or site support specialist.
Formed in 1997, Equistar is a $9.7 billion chemical company that is part of the Lyondell enterprise. It is one of the world’s largest producers of ethylene, propylene and polyethylene. The Houston-based company has more than 3,000 employees in 16 manufacturing facilities. The Corpus Christi plant, however, is about 200 miles from its nearest sister plant.
Given this distance, Corpus Christi cannot depend on spare-parts sharing with other Equistar facilities to keep systems running when equipment goes down. So, the plant must maintain a rather complete spare parts inventory for its Honeywell TDC3000 distributed control system (DCS). The 64-node system has been in place for about 15 years. As Bru puts it, “It’s an olefin plant and we can’t have downtime.” When one electronic card is used to replace a malfunctioning card, Bru notifies Honeywell and a replacement is sent immediately. The inventory is kept to the latest revision through this process. “We’ve never had a problem with Honeywell,” adds Bru.
Bru has also found the Triple S program to be a cost effective supplement to the maintenance and engineering staff at the plant.
“They come out and perform software upgrades on site. Although we do most of our own maintenance, having our [Honeywell] district site support specialist come out is less expensive than hiring another full-time technician. Plus, we benefit from all the training and expertise of a Honeywell-trained individual. He can fill many shoes for one price. He can configure the system for field loop changes or graphics changes. Last year during a plant turnaround, while my team was accomplishing all that work, the Honeywell technician did many support functions including a preventative maintenance to the High Performance Process Manager (HPM) upgrade.”
A further supplier resource for Bru is the local Honeywell field service manager. “By maintaining a close relationship with him,” notes Bru, “I have help expediting issues that we may have. For example, during a recent project to upgrade to handheld monitoring devices for our technicians, our field service manager was able to find the resources we needed to get the system up and running.”
Bru also reports one other benefit about working closely with Honeywell support. “Over time, we’ve kept the system up to the latest revisions. That way we’re not faced with a major upgrade expense at one time.”
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