Oil & Gas News (OGN): What are the major products and services Honeywell provides to the Saudi energy sector?
Phil Millette: Honeywell provides integrated solutions for automation, control, safety, physical and cyber security, including modelling/optimisation for upstream production (both onshore and offshore), oil and gas separation, gas processing and liquids extraction for major oil refinery operations.

Honeywell’s portfolio includes electrical termination goods to the Saudi market, via our MK electric operation in Jubail and building automation solutions to the Saudi construction market.

How long has the company been involved in the market and how is its growth? What is the staff strength in the region and in Saudi?
Honeywell has been active in Kingdom for over 30 years with a large and growing installed base of solutions already in the Kingdom, such as Saudi Aramco, Sabic and affiliates, private sector and JV companies. We have over 330 employees in the Kingdom.
Early in 2006, Honeywell signed a $12 million agreement with Sabic to provide advanced process control and implementation services to the company’s sites throughout the kingdom. Later in the same year, we announced a $7 million contract to supply process and safety controls for Tasnee Petrochemicals’ new ethylene plant in Saudi Arabia.
Honeywell is committed to growing its strategic presence in the Saudi market. It is essential that with the high-end technology, our customers in Saudi Arabia have immediate access to the local team of HPS experts. With our expanded product and enhanced technological offering, we are ensuring that dedicated account teams provide instant responses and customised solutions to our customers in the Kingdom.
As part of its long-term strategy, Honeywell is also playing an active role in developing the kingdom’s technical skills base through a number of education and training initiatives. Honeywell has established university relations programmes in Saudi Arabia that include graduate hires and student internships. Through its trainee programme, Honeywell hired eight graduate trainees in 2005 and doubled this figure in 2006.

What are the important factors contributing to the success of Honeywell in the region? How can the regional energy firms benefit from their association with Honeywell?
Local presence is a key factor with local project and service capabilities, as well as capabilities for advanced technology solutions. Regional firms benefit from consistent delivery, latest technology and local service.
Through our range of products and services we aim to improve our customers’ business performance with solutions that drive safety, reliability and efficiency.
Providing our customers with superior technology, HPS is the only vendor that offers an advanced range of business applications, technology, consulting and services developed specifically to meet the market’s needs. We work continually in partnership with our customers to ensure our solutions are the right fit and aligned with their business needs of today and in the future.
We are also the only vendor that offers a ‘continuous evolution’ model where process control systems evolve from one generation to the next to enhance the return on our customers’ technology investments.

Do you work with partners/distributors in the market? If so, who are your partners and what’s their role?
Honeywell works closely with a company called PAS focused on automation documentation solutions. Our DOC4000 solution is marketed alongside PAS Integrity in the Saudi market.

What facilities do you have to provide after-sales service to your customers? Do you have training facilities in the region?
Honeywell has a services office in Dammam, as well as in Jubail, with a full training centre and local accredited trainers. Honeywell’s Automation College in Abu Dhabi is the largest training facility in the Middle East.

How is the demand growth for your products in the region, especially in the Saudi market? How important is the market in the global context for Honeywell?
There are a number of factors driving the process control industry today. Organisations across all industries are under intense pressure to reduce operational costs, increase productivity and efficiency, and optimise processes.
Another major factor is the need minimise risks to the business, which requires that physical and cyber security measures be put in place, as well as comprehensive safety systems.
Add to this the fluctuating and often escalating costs of raw materials, such as crude oil, and the global demand for power. Organisations are also looking to optimise and make more effective use of their existing automation and control systems in the long term.
This market is very important to Honeywell. Demand growth is high across much of our range of Honeywell's solutions with the large amount of capital project spending in Kingdom, by all players in the market, as well as JV companies.

How was the year 2006 and the first half of 2007 for Honeywell in the market? What are the expectations for the full year?
2006 was a very good year. 2007 is looking similar.

Which products/services contributed most to the company’s success?
Fully integrated automation and safety solutions contribute significantly to Honeywell's success, but all of the solutions contribute including our advanced solutions portfolio.

What efforts are being made to expand sales? Are there plans to enter any new areas of business?
Honeywell has ongoing plans to manage the market's expansion. As for new areas of business, Honeywell has indicated intent to grow in the industrial security solutions market.

Please list major projects/contracts the company was involved with in recent times.
Honeywell has been awarded a $13.5 million contract to provide a manufacturing execution system (MES) for Dolphin Energy’s plant automation applications and pipeline automation system (PAA & PAS) project. The project will use Honeywell’s Business Flex applications, integrated with third-party technologies, across Dolphin Energy’s entire gas production, processing and pipeline distribution network in Qatar and UAE.  The solution will help Dolphin Energy streamline data handling to reduce manual entry tasks, provide better validation and reconciliation of data, and ensure that information is received and transmitted efficiently.
Honeywell has a $2.9 million contract to provide the process automation technology for Saudi European Petrochemical Company’s newest polypropylene plant, located in the industrial city of Al Jubail. The deal was awarded through Korean contractor Samsung Engineering.
Honeywell has been awarded a $7 million contract to implement an Experion process knowledge system (PKS) and Foundation fieldbus solution at a new chemical plant operated by Kuwait Paraxylene Production Company (KPPC). Honeywell is partnering with Italian contractor Tecnimont SpA and Korea-based SK Engineering & Construction to implement the solution, which will reduce installation and maintenance costs while boosting performance.
Honeywell announced a $7.7 million project to supply its Experion R300 and Safety Manager technology for the world’s largest paraxylene plant. Experion, Honeywell’s industry-leading process control and automation platform that provides actionable information to operators, will ensure smooth and efficient production at the $1.2-billion Sohar Aromatics plant, located at Oman’s Port of Sohar. The contract was awarded by GS Engineering and Construction, based in Seoul.
Honeywell has a $7 million contract to supply process and safety controls for Tasnee Petrochemicals’ new ethylene plant in Saudi Arabia. Samsung Engineering, one of the main contractors for the project, selected Honeywell to provide Experion to manage the ethylene production. Honeywell will also install its Safety Manager platform to reduce the risk of incidents at the plant. The project is scheduled for completion by December 2007 with production at the plant expected to begin in 2008. 
In addition Honeywell has been selected by Qatar Shell to design and implement an integrated process automation and control system for one of the world’s largest Gas to Liquids (GTL) plants. As the main automation contractor, Honeywell will supply Qatar Shell GTL with some of its high profile solutions, including Experion R300, UniSim process simulation solution; Safety Manager instrumented protection and fire and gas systems, to enable a smooth start-up and safe, reliable operations for the Pearl GTL project.

Please provide details of innovative technology and new solutions introduced by the company in the market recently.
Honeywell has introduced the Experion R300 to the region. Honeywell’s Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) is a unified system for process, business and asset management that helps industrial manufacturers increase their profitability and productivity by providing more information for faster and more effective decision making.
Experion R300 features include a unique vertical design which not only saves significant space in the control room, but also improves operator effectiveness through its Enhanced Procedural Operations functionality.
Experion serves all major industrial processing segments, including oil and gas, refining, chemicals, power generation and pulp and paper. The system integrates with safety measures dispersed throughout a manufacturing facility to reduce risk to employees and plant assets, increase process availability and improve regulatory compliance. Since its launch in 2003, Experion has helped thousands of customers worldwide improve productivity and profitability.
Honeywell has a layered approach to safety and security with solutions that integrate seamlessly with process and building controls. As an owner of chemical plants, Honeywell understands the importance of ensuring plant safety and meeting regulatory requirements, and its Specialty Materials Chemical Site in Geismar, Louisiana serves as a model for how best-in-class security can be successfully implemented. 
Honeywell’s OneWireless solutions offer an evolutionary opportunity to turn more information into knowledge across the plant, leading to optimised productivity, and improved safety, compliance and asset reliability. Without wire, transmitters can access information otherwise inaccessible and provide additional data to advanced process control, simulation and asset management applications.
Honeywell’s wireless-enabled solutions have helped customers meet specific challenges beyond just avoiding wiring costs. Shedding the wires provides manufacturers with the freedom and flexibility to creatively solve difficult challenges, such as enabling a more productive workforce.
What are the challenges and difficulties the company faces in region?
The regional rate of growth is posing an ongoing challenge of building capacity and skill set growth for people to do the work.
Increasing global demand for oil, gas and hydrocarbon products are financing an economic boom throughout the region, which has resulted in economic expansion. This growth will generate many exciting opportunities and challenges, and the automation sector has a strategic role to play.
The challenges are multi-fold. An important one is getting enough connectivity of base instrumentation, control and safety systems, to ensure all operational data, including manual entries, operators log entries and equipment diagnostics are all available in an integrated end-user environment.
Challenges also include the application and data integration via a framework approach that can include components from third-party and legacy software. Another challenge is the need for much higher bandwidth from well head to the platform/facility, and from offshore to onshore or remote site to office/expert location.
Truly understanding work flow continues to pose a challenge. There is a real need to review how work processes are structured, and to explore how new technologies can support change management in these areas. Telecom technology remains an ongoing challenge, particularly in wireless technology for transmitting real-time data. While the technology already exists, implementation lacks consistency.
 
What are the new trends in the industry the company is part of and how does Honeywell keep up-to-date with technology?
Wireless technology is emerging as a high growth area. Honeywell is in the leading position with our OneWireless solution, announced in June.
Honeywell’s OneWireless solution offers an evolutionary opportunity to turn more information into knowledge across the plant, leading to optimised productivity, and improved safety, compliance and asset reliability. Without wire, transmitters can access information otherwise inaccessible and provide additional data to advanced process control, simulation and asset management applications.
Honeywell’s wireless-enabled solutions have helped customers meet specific challenges beyond just avoiding wiring costs. Shedding the wires provides manufacturers with the freedom and flexibility to creatively solve difficult challenges, such as enabling a more productive workforce.
Honeywell’s vision for wireless is all encompassing. It includes field devices, closed loop regulatory control, manufacturing operations, maintenance, asset management, regulatory compliance and personnel safety.
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough is the concept of ‘mesh’ networking. The idea of the mesh came along with wired networks and is now a key inspiration of wireless industrial networking.  The mesh is a network of many intelligent nodes, each communicating to one of the nodes next to it in the network topography. The more nodes, the better the mesh. With an abundance of communication paths, redundancy is assured, because if a node drops out of the network for one reason of another, the other nodes around it will work out an alternative communications path.
Like hydrogen-fuelled cars, some battery-powered instruments perform well and show great promise but their future depends on technology that is yet to be developed.
Batteries are part of the wireless networking story that promoters aren’t eager to give a lot of attention to but with the advent of wireless, now they have to think of it a great deal of the time.
However, technology continues to show promise and it won’t be long before batteries with much longer lives or fuel cells will be developed and engineers won’t have to worry about power sources anymore. Power management has greatly improved; mobile phones are a testimony to this fact. And alternatives aren’t too far away either; thermal and vibration energy for example.