Source: Team Pro MFG

Digitalization enables you to understand customer insights, customer pain points, and customer patterns. This understanding, in turn, helps you to improve your services and improve your deliveries in the context of what your customer is looking for.

The second edition of the Pro MFG Technology Leadership Think Turf ‘Let’s Talk Scalability series’ powered by Nanoprecise Sci Corp focussed on ‘Smart Manufacturing and Operational Excellence’. This insightful fireside chat witnessed two esteemed industry speakers in Raju Goyal, Chief Technical Officer, UltraTech Cement and Sunil Vedula, Founder and CEO, Nanoprecise Sci Corp, engaging in an insightful conversation with Niranjan Mudholkar, Editorial Director, Pro MFG Media.

The digital transformation journey has many objectives. Could you shed light on the prioritisation for this journey?

Raju Goyal: As you rightly said, digital transformation is a journey. It is not like a one-off thing that you can do one day and leave it the next day. It is an evolution. You need to keep working on it and adopting it according to your business models and business plans. In terms of the key objectives, I will put customers first. Digitalization enables you to understand customer insights, customer pain points, and customer patterns. This understanding, in turn, helps you to improve your services and improve your deliveries in the context of what your customer is looking for.

Secondly, it is a journey where all the teams and all the stakeholders are collaborating and bringing results together rather than working in silos. In digital transformation, all stakeholders come to the same platform and contribute which gives us the opportunity to optimize and increase efficiencies. Working in silos creates gaps and as a result, things are either not on the table or things are under the table. With digitalization, we can bring them to the table and get the efficiencies as well as optimization.

When you understand your customer, understand your business and understand your people, you can generate new business models and explore areas where you have not gone before but which can give more value to your business.

Digital transformation also enables compliance because all the processes are well defined and this gives visibility to areas that have not been previously looked into or explored. This also gives transparency in terms of the total cost of ownership for the business.

Sunil Vedula: In my view, there are two fundamental objectives to digital transformation in the context of plant machinery and equipment. One is the understanding about the time of a possible machine failure and the second is the understanding of how you can improve its productivity or its efficiency. With the first one, which is also called predictive maintenance, you have further three objectives. You want to first determine if there is any anomaly, then you want to characterise the anomaly and then finally, if you find a fault, you try to determine the remaining time to failure for that machine. These are the three objectives of predictive maintenance. For process optimization, you have to consider aspects like power consumption reduction and GHG emission reduction. There are multiple elements to this: What type of sensors do you need for doing predictive maintenance? What type of sensors do you need for doing process optimization? Do you need additional sensors? Why do you need that? And then, there is the question of connectivity. Whether you need wired or wireless? Plus, you have to think about the data types. Is it a single point data type or a multi- point like a waveform type of data? When do you need and what type of data do you need? So every aspect is important. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle; you need a little bit of every element. What is important is to understand how you fit those elements to meet a specific objective in a specific application for a specific plant.

Digital technologies hold a lot of promise like increasing efficiency, reducing cost, enabling sustainability & innovation, and even improving customer experience. So, what are the ideal metrics when you are setting the KPIs?

Raju Goyal: In any business, large or small, there are a number of KPIs that enable us to run the business, monitor the business and benchmark it. We can improve the overall business performance through integration of different functions with common KPIs. However, what actually happens in many organizations is that the KPIs become department centric or function-sets focused. This leads to a misalignment between one function and another function. While a given KPI may be working perfectly fine within a function, it may not be the case with that function’s upstream or downstream. Digital technologies can provide a very good opportunity for a business, irrespective of its size, to bring all these KPIs on one platform.

We all know that the KPIs are based on data and data is the new oil. But for solving problems, what matters is the quality of the data and not the quantity. Therefore, the data quality also needs to be built into our KPIs in the context of four quadrants. I put customers in the first quadrant. You need to understand what the customer needs, what the market needs and where you want to play in the whole market. This will help you to develop the second quadrant of your process and operations; what capabilities you need to produce that market need in terms of quality, volumes as well as portfolio. The next quadrant is about people. You need to know what kind of people will be required, what kind of resources will be required, and what kind of skill sets, knowledge as well as data is required. And then I come to the last quadrant of finance. You might be surprised that I am putting the financial quadrant at the last. That’s because once everything else is aligned, then the finances will fall in place. However, if you start off with the financial quadrant, then it is likely that some areas like innovation cannot be driven. Some KPIs may not have direct tangible benefits; you need to look at the intangible benefits as well. So if you align all these four quadrants of customer, processes, people and finances, then it will be an efficient and effective business model that will lead to value creation for the business.

How would digital technologies help us integrate the KPIs?

Sunil Vedula: In terms of KPIs, I will go back to predictive maintenance and process optimization. When it comes to using technology, the question is whether you are able to increase the equipment life. One of the most important factors for any manufacturing organization is the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). After implementing the technology, has the OEE of your equipment increased? Are your operations running smooth and efficient? So the KPIs are really straightforward. And yes, as Mr. Goyal has mentioned, if you take care of your people, your processes and your data, the financial KPI will take care of itself.

Please give us insights on how plants are using IIOT technologies for managing HSE compliances.

Raju Goyal: Let me start with the HSE aspect first. Today, there are a number of technologies and a number of tools available to enable HSE compliance. I believe that IIoT can play an important role with regards to HSE especially in the heavy industry or plants having high operational focus. In such plants, we can use sensors to gather information from places where it is dangerous or difficult for humans to go. Then we can have an audio visual kind of a system which you can read or sense the environment around them and translate it into text data or concrete information. Another example is using cameras for monitoring people working on heights. The camera not only captures the image but also analyses it and tells us whether these people have safety harnesses and helmets. Then we have the drone technology that can be used to access confined or dangerous places where humans cannot go. Similarly, robotic technology can also be used to enhance health and safety.

Moreover, technology not only helps us collect data but also enables us to understand and analyse it. For example, when data is collected from damaged equipment or from an accident scenario, it can be used to take corrective action for all the other locations where similar equipment are used or are prone to similar accidents.

Sunil Vedula: We have a case study from Oman related to oil wells where they use the sucker rod pumps to drill oil. These typically suffer from a specific problem called Polish Rod Misalignment. So if that happens then the sucker rod pump is not able to drill oil. So we were able to detect this Polish Rod Misalignment. In fact, we were able to detect it accurately and inform them at least six days in advance. It was the first time that the user wanted to try and see what happened. So they just let it go and after five days, the failure happened. Once it failed, it was a five-day downtime for them. The cost of the Polish rod is relatively low and replacing it would have taken about two days. So they could have easily saved three days and that’s 5600 barrels of oil. Fortunately, no human life was involved in this case.

However, there was a case in India in December 2020 where two people died and 14 were injured in an accident. After that, we pitched to them that we could detect the misalignment of the pistons on the vertical reciprocating pump for ammonia. And, we installed our sensors. The customer did not bargain on the price at all and said that they just want this issue to be resolved, because they did not want to lose any more lives. From the moment they started monitoring with our sensors, they have not had any untoward incident. They are taking it very, very seriously. In fact, now they have a big screen in their office with an alarm that can go off if a problem is detected. So this is what IIOT technologies are leading to in the HSE space. It’s very encouraging to see that organisations are now putting people’s lives above everything else. I can relate with what Raju ji was saying that people and customers take priority over the financial KPIs.

Disruption is actually the new normal that we live in today’s time. And there are so many new technologies that are coming up. So are there any new technologies that excite you?

Raju Goyal: When it comes to the process industry, there is a huge amount of data being generated every second or even every millisecond whether it is related to temperature, pressure, flow, vibrations and all other relevant aspects. Can we convert this data into information and then can we convert that information into action? I think this is where new technology can play a big role. We have seen the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) but I believe a lot more can be done on those two fronts. AI and ML can play a very important role in converting data into information then to action. Further, it can convert action into decision making. So I will say that the technology that excites me is AI and ML. Also, robotics is something that I am equally excited about. Robotic technology can replace all human activities where repeated tasks or safety hazards are involved.

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