Controls for Brazilian cement company.

GE Intelligent Platforms has received a $4.5 million order from Cimentos Liz, a leading cement company in Brazil, for the company’s breakthrough process solution Proficy® Process Systems. Cimentos Liz, a Soeicom S/A company, with plants in Vespasian in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, will use the solution for a plant upgrade to control raw mill, furnace, packing and crushing applications, among others.

Cimentos Liz believes that producing quality products that meet the expectations and needs of their customers is essential to ensure their competitiveness in the market. Therefore, the company maintains strict quality control, from extraction of raw materials for cement until the last stage of production. The company is also committed to creating value in a sustainable manner by using natural resources efficiently to ensure their availability for future generations. 

GE teamed with Cimentos Liz and pulled together a team from both organizations that consisted of a variety of developers, systems engineers, plant operators, and directors to develop the system requirements.  The result is a solution that will utilize GE’s Proficy Process Systems and the Proficy Software Platform to provide all aspects of process control, supervision, alarm management, release management, asset management and quality control across the plant.  Proficy Historian, part of Proficy Process Systems, bridges the gap between their process control system and their business system, capturing the critical information necessary to create a sustainable advantage for their operations.  

“Proficy Process Systems will allow us to define, create and execute the control strategies we were looking for to meet the needs of our company and to satisfy our mission of operational excellence,” said Túlio Soares, Engineering Manager for Cimentos Liz. “It is a highly flexible and scalable system with user programmable features that provide the agility and security we need to monitor and control multiple devices in diverse areas to give us the quality and regularity that we strive for in our product offerings.”

"The company needed a solution that could provide critical process control for their manufacturing operations while also providing the ability to vertically integrate to their business systems at the same time,” said Bernie Anger, General Manager of GE Intelligent Platforms’ Control & Communications Systems. “We needed to integrate the various areas of the plant in a single and flexible platform with low-cost engineering.

“To gain insight and manage operations to provide the kind of sustainability and quality Cimentos Liz is requiring of its business they must be able to visualize, analyze and optimize every aspect of their processes, equipment and resources,” continued Anger. “By adding intelligence to their production environment, our innovative Proficy Process Systems provides lower total cost of ownership, greater productivity, efficiency and profitability for a sustainable competitive advantage.”