Best Practice Mineral Processing through Virtual Communities
Alcoa World Alumina operates nine refineries in six countries, encompassing four continents and as many languages. While the same Bayer process is used in each location, knowledge transfer was sporadic, relying on the contacts and drive of individuals and periodic formal refinery reviews. Previous attempts to develop formalized, ongoing means of transferring good ideas between locations failed to achieve sustained success
In 2004, two full time personnel were appointed to develop and support the Best Practice Transfer Program, which aims to capture and transfer best practices. Over 80 Virtual Communities have been developed, of which 50 are currently functioning, and only four have met face to face.
Each Community consists of selected core members and is led by a recognised expert. By sharing knowledge, best practices are identified, documented and transferred to other locations. The formal and informal knowledge transfer achieved through conversation and collaborative software speeds up problem solving and deployment of solutions. With over 60 best practices documented, the process has a demonstrated added value of $10M US annually.
The Communities cover many facets of process operations, including Safety, Environment, Engineering, among others. Chemical Engineering communities include Process Modelling and precipitation, clarification and digestion unit operations.
Communities are beginning to be accepted as part of daily life in Alcoa, being built into systems such as capital requests, recruitment and operational performance monitoring. They have proven themselves to be our best method of transferring knowledge and reducing the time taken to solve problems.