PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING
Client Success
Voisey's Bay Nickel Company
Inco Limited (now Vale Inco) commissioned Crivella Technologies to perform a cross functional business analysis, using its proven Strategic Action Planning, and to create an Integrated Business Plan for its Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company mine and operations. The comprehensive planning process was performed to create a “blueprint” for business development, which integrated the many specialized efforts that went into developing VBNC’s mission, values and strategic vision for the development of the mine, surface facilities and overall business operations.
While serving as Business Architect, Crivella Technologies facilitated the strategic meetings for numerous internal and external experts who contributed their unique knowledge to this project. Crivella Technologies then incorporated this expertise into balanced integrated approaches for VBNC to best structure its operations and business conduct.
The Strategic Action Planning process incorporated interdisciplinary insights and requirements from all major business and operating areas including business management, exploration, mining, milling and processing operations, finance, sales and marketing, production planning, maintenance, IT, aboriginal peoples relations, and quality management.
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company commissioned Crivella Technologies to engineer, develop specifications for, and construct the overall integrated computer control system for its Napanee, Ontario Tire Manufacturing Facility. Crivella Technologies systems and software engineers devised cutting edge computer process control systems to fully integrate 360 discrete process and machine control systems, which proved vital to Goodyear’s goals of attaining overall control of every aspect of the tire manufacturing process and to continuously improve product quality and cost efficiency.
Crivella Technologies worked closely with Goodyear process engineering and Plant operational management to ensure that the computer control and information systems closely supported the Goodyear’s goals for operational efficiency, unit cost per tire, and plant operation strategies.
Crivella Technologies developed all engineering specifications for each separate control system and developed the overall plan for systems integration, software testing and plant commissioning. Beyond the overall systems engineering design and software engineering efforts, Crivella Technologies developed comprehensive engineering specifications for third party system developers and integrators, and managed these third parties’ technical and contract compliance on behalf of Goodyear.
Goodyear Napanee
Corning Incorporated
Corning is one of the world’s leading innovators in materials science. For more than 165 years, Corning has applied its expertise in glass, ceramics, and optical physics to develop products and processes that have transformed industries. Corning commissioned Crivella Technologies to provide project management, systems engineering, and software development services in the creation of its Integrated Process Analysis System, optical glass manufacturing process control and quality management systems, and the creation of an overall design framework for computer integrated manufacturing. This project, concluding after eight years of continuous development, gained worldwide recognition for both manufacturing quality performance and engineering excellence. In recognition of this achievement, Corning received the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award for manufacturing performance excellence. This award is the only formal recognition of the performance excellence of both public and private U.S. organizations given by the President of the United States. Crivella West was honored by Corning for its contribution and engineering success.
The Integrated Process Analysis System (IPAS) was an example of Crivella Technologies' sophisticated data fusion and advanced data analytics. The IPAS technology collected vast quantities of process control and process performance data, spanning all processes involved in optical glass manufacturing. IPAS provided advanced big data analytics capabilities, supporting the mathematical and statistical analysis of this data in order to understand all process variables contributing to production yield losses, cause and effect relationships, and developing needed changes to manufacturing operations in order to improve quality and reduce shrinkage (yield losses). Crivella Technologies served as principle systems architect, engineer and developer of the Integrated Process Analysis System. As such, Crivella Technologies designed the overall computer integrated manufacturing framework that enabled all contributing real-time process supervisory control systems and machine control systems to be integrated together in order to support IPAS and Corning’s continuous quality improvement program. Crivella Technologies was also instrumental in developing advanced methods of complex data analysis and data visualization to aid manufacturing and process engineering analysis of accumulated process data.
United States Marine Corps
The United States Marine Corps, facing the potential loss of its Depot Maintenance capabilities, commissioned Crivella Technologies to develop a comprehensive operational improvement and business plan to substantially enhance and improve the cost, quality, and delivery performance of its two major depot maintenance equipment repair complexes in Albany, GA and Barstow CA. Marine Corps leadership had concluded that achieving world class business performance was key to ensuring that mission critical maintenance capabilities were not lost due to the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process of realignment and closure of military installations. Crivella Technologies was selected to lead the development of the Depot Maintenance Business Plan after a national search for experience and demonstrated results in leading world class, critical business change efforts.
The effort to develop the needed improvements involved over 60 key Marine Corp Depot Maintenance business and process specialists, Crivella Technologies systems engineers, and critical Marine Corps leaders. Together this team performed a “top to bottom”, cross functional and interdisciplinary analysis of all mission critical depot business, process and quality functions. Numerous opportunities for doing business better and for accomplishing the desired world class performance were identified and implemented. The resulting Integrated Depot Maintenance Business Plan was issued as a formal order by the Commanding General, MARCORLOGBASES for immediate implementation. Critically, the Marine Corps, through its demonstrated superior performance of its industrial complexes successfully navigated the BRAC process and continued to retain mission critical functions under its immediate control.
Timken Steel
“The Timken Company is building a “World Class” steel mill that not only produces a uniform high-quality product, but does it at the lowest cost.”—Joseph F. Toot, Jr., President.
Facing the challenge of high quality, low cost, competition The Timken Company invested over $500 Million into the construction of a new Faircrest steel making plant – an invest equal to approximately 2/3 of the net worth of the company.
Arthur Crivella served as Design Project Engineer overseeing the design and construction of this major industrial investment. Wayne West, serving as technical lead responsible for all process control systems was responsible for overall systems integration and plant startup. Crivella Technologies' Kernel systems integration software was used to integrate all Supervisory process management systems and plant management systems. Following the project feasibility study, Messrs. Crivella and West managed and facilitated a comprehensive cross functional analysis to layout a Strategic Action Plan. This detailed planning was performed to clearly articulate The Timken Company’s goals and strategies concerning plant equipment and facilities, product quality and mechanisms for quality improvement, plant management methods, integration with other Timken Company operations and business functions, personnel selection, organization and development, and other critical business aspects need to achieve the companies goals and to ensure that the all components and aspects of the Faircrest Plant were designed, constructed and operated as a totally integrated world call facility. This overall Strategic Action Plan was used to direct all engineering and construction activities, internal preparations to staff organize and manage the plant, the specification and acquisition of all plant equipment, the implementation of a totally integrated hierarchical control system, and all other preparations and commissioning activities.
Crivella Technologies led the design and implementation of an Hierarchical Computer Control System, implementing a distributed network of machine control, hundreds of thousands of sensors and actuators, process supervisory control, plant management and business systems, designed to function in a totally integrated manner and designed to support Timken’s strategies for process and business operations. Crivella West directly supervised over 30 vendors, equipment supplies and over 620 thousand labor hours of software development. As stated by Al B. Glosssbrenner, Vice President – Steel Operations, “With its sophisticated computerization, the Faircrest facility will change the popular perception of the steelworker as a brawny individual accustomed to heavy labor. Our Faircrest work force will master electronics. In many cases, they will simply be trouble shooters, keeping an eye on computers monitoring nearly every phase of steelmaking”.
Following successful Faircrest Plant commissioning, The Timken Company licensed to Crivella Technologies critical software applications which had proven indispensable to the success of the Faircrest Plant. This technology was incorporated into Crivella Technologies' Kernel system which, after further development and refinement, was licensed back to The Timken Company for deployment in Faircrest and elsewhere. Crivella Technologies was honored to have our engineering, management, and security practices and systems integration designs studied by the US DoD funded Software Engineering Institute. “The Faircrest computerization, the systems engineering effort that created it and how the controls and management systems are integrated into the fabric of Faircrest facility is the best I have ever seen” Dr. John H Manley, Director of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and former Director of Software Policy for Air Force Systems Command.
Today, Timken Steel’s Faircrest Steel Plant develops some of the cleanest and strongest alloy steels in the world. The plant features more than 20 acres under its roof on a 450-acre site near Canton, Ohio, and houses individual steelmaking, ingot and continuous casting and steel-processing facilities. Customers across the globe rely on this steel to strengthen their energy-drilling equipment, industrial machinery, rail axles, mining equipment, automotive drivelines and transmissions, agriculture machinery and more. Since the plant’s first 175-ton electric arc furnace poured its initial heat of steel, the Faircrest Steel Plant became one of the industry’s most advanced alloy steel manufacturing facilities in the world.
Timken Steel from a Distance
US Steel
Crivella Technologies is the exclusive licensee of United States Steel’s continuous casting supervisory process control and management technology. This cutting-edge process management software has been incorporated into and serves as a basis for Crivella Technologies' Caster Process Management System. Crivella Technologies provided systems engineering, design development and project management services for the Integrated Hierarchical Computer Control System covering the No. 2 Quick Basic Oxygen Process (Q-BOP) and Continuous Slab Casting processes.
Using the proven USS technology, Crivella Technologies developed a even more robust and sophisticated supervisory computer control system, called Caster, which is adapted to continuous casting applications in the metals industry. Caster Continuous Casting Supervisory Control is the system that oversees the process by which molten steel is solidified into a semi-finished slab, blooms or billets that will later be rolled in the finishing mills. The Caster system incorporates a robust range of process control and instrumentation components, includes communication modules for data exchange with a wide variety of other machine control, peer process control supervisory and higher level plant and business management systems. The Caster system accepts production quantity and quality schedules and specifications and manages the over process for meeting the established production schedules spanning the quantity and quality of steel production. The system incorporates advanced features for dynamic analytical assessment of production quality variables and utilizes artificial intelligence for prediction of quality performance, schedule performance and the availability of maintenance windows of opportunity. Caster incorporates an integrated tracking system and continuously incorporates all tracking, quality and other performance data into an integrated process analysis system.
