Najran Cement Company

First-Mover Thinking and Integrated Innovation in Saudi Arabia’s Najran Region

A Consistent Pattern of Going First

Najran Cement Company (NCC) has a documented track record of being the first in the Saudi cement industry to implement technologies and practices that the broader sector later adopts. It was the first cement plant in the Kingdom to install and commission one of the largest Waste Heat Recovery steam turbine generator systems in the cement sector. It has been producing blended cement with supplementary cementitious materials since 2012, a decade before green cement became a mainstream conversation in Saudi Arabia. And it launched Wasel, the first B2B cement sales and delivery mobile application of its kind among Saudi cement companies.

This pattern of early adoption is not accidental. It reflects an organizational philosophy described by NCC’s own leadership as a commitment to continuous improvement and operational excellence, supported by a management structure with both the technical depth and the institutional confidence to invest ahead of the market. Understanding NCC’s sustainability and digital transformation agenda requires understanding this first-mover culture as the organizing logic behind individual initiatives.

The WHR Achievement

Defining a New Benchmark for the Kingdom

NCC operates three clinker production lines at its main plant in Al-Mandafan: Line 1 at 6,000 tons per day, Line 2 at 3,000 tons per day, and Line 3 at 6,500 tons per day, giving a total clinker production capacity of approximately 15,500 to 16,000 tons per day. To meet the power requirements of this three-line facility, the company also operates a 10-unit diesel generator power plant with 75 MW of installed capacity.

The Waste Heat Recovery system that NCC designed and commissioned was built to serve all three kiln lines simultaneously, along with the exhaust heat from the 10 diesel generator sets. The system consists of 18 boilers in total: five preheater boilers, three Air Quench Cooler (AQC) boilers, and 10 diesel generator waste heat boilers. These feed two dual-pressure steam turbine generators, each rated at 15 MW, for a total WHR capacity of 30 MW. The system was engineered and constructed by Sinoma Energy Conservation of China, with project consulting by Holtec Consulting.

The performance numbers for this system are specific and substantial. The 30 MW WHR plant meets approximately 34 percent of the total power requirement of the facility, replacing the equivalent electricity generation that would otherwise have been provided by the diesel generator sets. The annual HFO saving is approximately 37,200 tons per year. The annual CO2 reduction attributable to the WHR system is approximately 145,000 tons per year, by replacing diesel-generated electricity with clean power recovered from waste heat that would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere through the kiln preheater stacks and cooler exhaust.

To put this in context: at a carbon intensity of roughly 3.17 tons of CO2 per ton of HFO combusted, saving 37,200 tons of HFO annually represents a direct emissions reduction of that magnitude, achieved without any reduction in clinker production volume. It is pure efficiency gain, extracted from an energy stream that the plant was previously discarding. The WHR investment defines precisely what decoupling production growth from carbon intensity looks like in practice at cement plant scale.

Blended Cement Since 2012

A Decade of Green Product Leadership

While much of the Saudi cement sector has been discovering blended cement and SCM substitution as a sustainability imperative in recent years, NCC has been doing it since 2012. For more than a decade, the company has systematically substituted clinker with supplementary cementitious materials, specifically limestone and natural pozzolana, across substitution rates ranging from 10 to 30 percent depending on the product type.

The product range built on this platform includes Lyasa Cement, Pozzolanic Portland Cement (PPC), Lyasa Plus Cement, and Turbo Cement. Each product in this portfolio delivers a measurable reduction in carbon footprint relative to OPC, because every percentage point of clinker replaced by SCMs eliminates the process CO2 that would have been generated during clinker production. At the higher end of the substitution range, this represents a clinker factor of 70 percent, which is among the more aggressive substitution positions being achieved commercially in the Saudi market.

The significance of NCC’s twelve-year commitment to blended cement production is not just the environmental benefit, though that benefit is real and accumulating. It is the operational and quality management learning that a decade of blended cement production generates. Consistent quality across a product range with 10 to 30 percent SCM substitution requires precise raw material characterization, careful mix design, rigorous testing, and mature process control. NCC has that expertise embedded in its quality and production systems in a way that cannot be replicated quickly by producers who are only now beginning their blended cement journey.

Operational Excellence

Fan Replacement and the Compound Effect

NCC’s success stories document highlights a specific operational improvement that illustrates how targeted engineering investments compound their benefits across multiple performance dimensions simultaneously. The replacement of three major process fans in the pyro-processing section of Line 1 increased clinker production by 6 percent on a sustained basis.

The significance of this achievement extends beyond the production volume increase itself. When a kiln line produces 6 percent more clinker per unit of time with the same thermal and electrical energy inputs, the specific energy consumption per ton of clinker falls by approximately the same proportion. Lower specific heat consumption (SHC) directly reduces the carbon intensity of clinker production, because less fuel is burned per ton of clinker produced. Lower specific power consumption (SPC) reduces the electrical energy demand per ton, which reduces the load on the WHR system and the diesel generators, further compounding the carbon benefit.

The fan replacement is a representative example of a class of operational improvement that is often undervalued in sector-level sustainability discussions: targeted, evidence-based equipment optimization that delivers sustained improvements in energy efficiency and carbon intensity without requiring major capital programs or new technology deployments. NCC’s shop floor engineering team identified a constraint in the pyro-processing airflow system, addressed it with precision, and captured a compounding set of benefits. This is operational excellence as a sustainability tool.

NCC’s roadmap includes the planned upgrade of its Distributed Control Systems (DCS) with integration of Expert Optimizer software, which will bring AI-driven automated process optimization to the kiln lines. The Expert Optimizer system at NCC is already installed for kiln operation but is engaged selectively during stable operating conditions. The planned upgrade will extend its active deployment, delivering continuous process optimization, further reductions in specific energy consumption, and improved kiln reliability.

Digital Transformation

The Wasel Ecosystem and Oracle Integration

NCC’s digital transformation agenda is built on two parallel tracks: the enterprise IT layer centered on Oracle R20 ERP, and the customer-facing digital infrastructure anchored by the Wasel integrated digital system.

The Oracle R20 implementation covers financials, inventory management, payroll, sales and distribution, with real-time integration to external systems including Al Rajhi Bank for automated account reconciliation. The production operations are instrumented from the Central Control Room using ABB Distributed Control Systems covering the full production process from the crusher through to the final product silos. Automatic sampling systems transport samples from the field to the laboratory through pneumatic tubes. Near-infrared (NIR) analyzers measure raw material composition in real time. Weigh bridges and dispatch operations are automated and integrated with the ERP.

The SIRI assessment places NCC at Band 3 (Integrated) on Enterprise Automation and Enterprise Intelligence, recognizing that Oracle R20 provides fully automated enterprise processes with diagnostic capability, including automatic notifications with dynamic data fields that identify the root cause of operational deviations. The Central Control Room integration with DCS provides Band 3 (Interoperable and Secure) Shop Floor Connectivity, and the power management system achieves Band 3 (Diagnostic) Facility Intelligence.

On the customer-facing layer, NCC launched Wasel in 2024: the first B2B cement sales and delivery mobile application in the Saudi cement industry. Wasel is not a simple ordering interface. It is an integrated digital infrastructure connecting NCC’s customers, the Oracle ERP, a vehicle tracking system, and the Public Transport Authority’s waybill issuance system through a unified platform. Customers can order any of NCC’s cement products 24 hours a day, seven days a week, schedule future orders, track their orders from dispatch to delivery in real time, and authenticate digital proof of delivery. The development of Wasel began in late 2023 and all modules were successfully completed and integrated with supporting systems in 2024.

Underpinning the Wasel system is NCC’s own transport subsidiary: Wasl Al-Janoub Land Transport Company, established in 2020. This vertical integration of the delivery function, connecting production output directly to customer site through a company-owned fleet managed by a company-built digital system, gives NCC a level of control over customer service quality, delivery reliability, and logistics cost that purely commercial freight arrangements cannot match. The Wasel digital infrastructure sitting on top of this fleet creates a customer experience that is, by the company’s own description, unique in the Saudi cement sector.

SIRI Assessment

An Honest Starting Point

The SIRI assessment conducted for NCC produced an overall score of approximately 1.99, reflecting an organization that is operating with solid digital foundations but has well-defined dimensions where further maturity investment will unlock the next level of performance. The assessor’s comments are candid and constructive: to move from digital operations to integrated operations, NCC needs to formalize Production Planning and Scheduling, Quality Management, and Enterprise Asset Management within the digital ecosystem. When these processes are digitalized, the production PDCA cycle becomes transparent to all departments, improving market responsiveness and asset utilization.

The assessor’s recommendation to develop a production data historian with connectivity to enterprise analytics solutions is particularly significant. NCC’s current DCS infrastructure generates continuous process data, but that data is not yet systematically pooled into a central repository for historical analysis and automated root cause identification. Building that capability would enable the kind of predictive and diagnostic intelligence that the assessor identifies as the highest-value improvement available to the company in the next phase of its digital journey.

Importantly, NCC provided detailed and well-reasoned rebuttals to several assessor scores, arguing, for example, that the Oracle-based inventory and production status visibility that managers have access to justifies a Band 3 rating for Vertical Integration rather than Band 2. These rebuttals reflect an organization that understands its own systems carefully and engages with the assessment process as a genuine improvement tool rather than a box-checking exercise.

What This Means for the Sector

From FCI’s perspective, NCC’s sustainability profile demonstrates something the sector needs to understand clearly: the compounding value of sustained, early commitment. The WHR system commissioned in 2013 has now been reducing CO2 by 145,000 tons per year for well over a decade. The blended cement production program running since 2012 has built quality management depth that cannot be replicated overnight. The Wasel platform, built on a decade of Oracle ERP experience, represents a digital customer service capability that raises the competitive bar for the entire sector.

NCC does not describe itself as the largest or fastest-growing cement company in the Kingdom. It describes itself as committed to excellence, continuous improvement, and environmental protection. That posture, maintained over years through specific investments with specific measured results, is precisely the kind of industrial leadership that creates durable competitive advantage and lasting environmental impact. The next chapter, upgrading DCS systems with Expert Optimizer integration and building the Industry 4.0 roadmap the SIRI assessment recommends, will extend that advantage further.