Honeywell’s digital vision

Mansour Belhadj, vice president Sales, EMEA at Honeywell speaks to Pipeline Magazine about focusing on digitalisation and how the Middle East is leading the charge.

Honeywell is putting great focus on plant digitisation to allow our customer to operate assets and people in an industrial world safely, reliably, and efficiently. The ultimate objective is to operate customers’ enterprise in a differentiated fashion leading to high financial incentives and great positioning from market competitiveness perspective.

“Honeywell strives to develop constantly highly innovative and differentiated breakthrough technologies such as the Honeywell Connected Plant solutions for various process automation industries, including the oils and gas industry. Honeywell Connected Plant brings together the physical and digital world to address the critical pain points of the customers. Honeywell believes in establishing connections across multiple customers’ assets to ensure plants are running at high efficiency and workers operate in a safe environment,” said Belhadj.

“Honeywell’s unique capabilities bring together data, industry knowledge and technology to connect customers’ process, people, and assets to reach unmatched levels of safety, reliability, efficiency, and profitability. Honeywell Connected Plant technologies facilitate data sharing across multiple assets and generate an unprecedented way to operate manufacturing sites connecting seamlessly headquarters to all assets owned by the enterprise,” he added.

Belhadj explained that Honeywell is seeing a total shift in oil and gas operations, leading to the need to innovate on how people are trained and constantly improve skills and competencies.

“Another key element is the people. In the next five years, a large proportion of oil and gas professionals will retire. How the oil and gas industry intends to replace this massive loss of know-how? Honeywell is deploying great efforts to ensure we address this unique challenge and maintain constantly know-how and competencies within operating plants. Another focus is to ensure fresh graduates engineers are trained with high efficiency and within a very short period using the latest technologies such as immersive virtual reality(VR) and augmented reality(AR) technologies. These breakthrough technologies help the trainees to capture fast and efficiently all required knowledge to operate a plant safely and reliably”.

The Middle East region is a key focus area for Honeywell.

“The Middle East region represents one of Honeywell biggest focus in relation to digitalisation. NOCs in the region are constantly considering breakthrough technologies to maximise revenues, reduce operating cost and run assets at high efficiency. Digitalisation represents tremendous savings and is a key differentiator in a highly competitive energy market. This is an exciting time for global organisation such as Honeywell to cooperate closely with regional NOCs to improve their bottom line and competitive position,” said Belhadj.

Cyber security centre

All this digitalisation transformation won’t happen without a cyber-secured environment. Belhadj talked about how Honeywell has been at the forefront of developments and innovations in industrial cybersecurity.

“Honeywell invested several years ago in industrial cybersecurity, predicting this wave of digitalisation. Cybersecurity represents a key element in the successful deployment of Honeywell Connected Plant to support our customers’ businesses. To facilitate a successful deployment of the Connected Plant technologies, Honeywell deployed a cybersecurity risk management solution designed to proactively monitor, measure, and manage cybersecurity risks for industrial plants, providing users with real-time visibility, understanding and decision support required for action.

It is a high priority for Honeywell to create end -to-end cybersecurity solutions and systems, which are adopted by our customers. In line with our commitment to innovation for cybersecurity, we have established centres of excellence in different parts of the world. The latest one is based in Dubai which was inaugurated in 2018.

In this centre, we simulate cyber-attacks to train our customers how to react using differentiated technologies and governance procedures” explained Belhadj.

The feedback received from our customers on the opening of a cybersecurity lab in the Middle East region is very positive and highly encouraging.

“I feel we have done an outstanding job in developing differentiated cybersecurity solutions and in parallel expanding our Connected Plant portfolio. We have had a huge interest from the market and our centre is fully booked for the next few months. Today we are leading the pace in a cyber-secured connected plant and enterprise solutions and we are not just talking about it. We are deploying proven and robust solutions at customers’ sites. We are the only organisation that is showing this level of integration between digitalisation and cybersecurity.”

Expanding portfolio

He ended by talking about expanding Honeywell’s portfolio offering.

“Data speed and computing power have dramatically changed the world in which we operate today. One of the greatest pain points that our industrial customers face today is that applications are custom built and are not repeatable, nor do these applications share data through a connected, seamless, integrated system. Recently we have announced the formation of a new business group called Honeywell Connected Enterprise, which is meant to address in a focused fashion and comprehensively this objective across all Honeywell businesses by deploying differentiated and fully integrated solutions at a much faster pace to ensure rapid adoption from the market.”

 This interview first appeared in the March issue of Pipeline Oil & Gas Magazine