Alcoa recognizes best practice sharing with internal awards

At Alcoa, innovation is embedded in our vision to reinvent the aluminum industry for a sustainable future. Part of innovating means learning from each other and sharing best practices around the world to highlight impactful solutions while improving process efficiency.  

Alcoans from different locations are encouraged to connect and share knowledge to identify and solve problems more effectively. Recently, Alcoa presented its internal Best Practice Awards, which include two categories: Communities of Practice and Best Practice Transfer.

• The Communities of Practice award is presented to a team that effectively collaborates to solve problems and transfers solutions between locations.
• The alumina segment’s Precipitation Community, which has a long-standing record of high engagement, proven results and high standard of professionalism, won the award for 2022 performance. With monthly meetings and more than 30 participants from refineries around the world, the community has a sharp focus on the business case to improve yield performance.

• The Best Practice Transfer awards are identified in each of our operating processes (mining, refining, smelting and casting) with one overall global winner. The 2022 winners include:
• Mining operations: Juruti Mine, Brazil, for transferring Reliability Excellence Best Practices from Huntly, Australia, using proven equipment management strategies to build a long-term plan for the location. This resulted in a 43 percent equipment downtime reduction in 2 years with associated availability earnings and cost savings.
• Refining operations: Wagerup Refinery, Australia, for learning from its fellow Australian Pinjarra and Kwinana refineries and creating a digital model for power generation. The model runs every hour to optimize power generation based on refinery steam and power demand, electricity costs, equipment constraints and performance data. This results in lower energy costs, less emissions and reduced maintenance costs.
• Smelting: Baie-Comeau Smelter, Canada, proactively sought learnings from the Deschambault smelter, which is also in Canada, to reduce the significant health, safety and operational costs that inevitably occur when smelting pots start to leak. This resulted in safely stopping 95 percent of the pots in 2022 marking a significant improvement from 37 percent in 2018 when the efforts begun.
• Casting: Baie-Comeau Smelter, Canada, successfully implemented a digital model of the metal flow and production in its casthouse with help from the Casting and Smelting Center of Excellence resulting in a 28 percent increase in value added production.

Between the four segment winners, one project was selected as the overall winner for the Global Best Practice Transfer Award. The Baie-Comeau smelter was selected for their “Toward Zero Pot Tap out” project. The team’s efforts not only reduced operating costs, but also significantly improved the health and safety of smelting employees, while reducing plant emissions.

Congratulations to all who created and implemented the solutions alike for turning raw to real!