EMAL wins Cisco innovation award 2011

Emirates Aluminium’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) department has been honoured with an Innovation Award 2011 by the world’s leading network solutions provider – Cisco. The annual award was in recognition of the UAE flagship industrial project’s implementation of Ethernet-to-the-Factory, earning the accolade of ‘Most Innovative Business Impacting Network’.

Taking place last month, the awards recognise organisations that embrace new and advanced technology whilst leading the field in delivering tangible benefits for business and society, and achievements in the deployment and implementation of innovative technologies.

Emirates Aluminium (EMAL) was chosen by a panel of nine experts for the award due to its provision of innovative network-centric services, such as flexible and highly secure network access, collaboration technologies and solutions aimed at improving life and health.

EMAL has been using Cisco network solutions to provide services to both corporate and manufacturing automations, which extend through its partner networks in order to support sales, marketing and logistics functions.

Saeed Fadhel Al Mazrooei, EMAL’s President and CEO, said: “We invested in the best technologies to create one of the largest, most sustainable and technologically advanced smelters in the world". The implementation of Cisco has enabled EMAL to optimise and simplify operations and eliminate manual overheads.

EMAL has worked extensively with experts to enable the plant floor automations systems to integrate with the real time production systems as well as the office business applications such as the sales, distribution and finance systems. 

The critical network services have to be functional, robust and secure in order to operate the plant with zero down time, which have all been achieved since the project’s commencement.