Accelerating adoption of digital technologies by the chemical industry depends on a variety of factors including huge pressure to remain competitive due to narrow margins, said Samir Dhaga, Director – Strategy, Grassdoor Logistics Technologies in his keynote address on ‘Achieving Operational Excellence through Digital Transformation at the CIO Connect 2024 organized by Indian Chemical News (ICN) on November 29, 2024 in Mumbai. 

“There are pressures on upping the revenue and to remain competitive, players need to produce higher quality. With pressures on spending, they need to bring down the cost of operations. Then there is regulatory pressure that comes from sustainability which is now a business imperative critical to business today. We have public ESG frameworks that actually quantify system sustainability, now measured with a score,” added Dhaga.

Sharing his thoughts on challenges often encountered during implementation of the digital tools, Dhaga said: “The research shows that 70% of chemical companies are leveraging digital tools. As per reports, there is 15 to 20% increase in efficiency in the first year. In my previous company we used to try to address all these challenges manually and imagine the daunting task of looking at millions of bits of data on excel sheets, and trying to achieve operational experience. It was almost an impossible task yet people have different definitions of operational experience. So the first is capacity enhancement. You can build 20 other plants but capacity enhancement through cycle optimization is the difficult task. Second is optimizing your cycle time. In our previous organization, we went through some digital transformation analysis and implementation of the digital transformation tool. Distributed Control System (DCS) system with us would give us not only the current real time view of the entire plant and what is happening but also because there was historical data, we could apply machine learning models in AI models and top of it to decide what was the best cycle that we had over a period of time. We called it the golden batch, the the most ideal batch with best cycle time, and quality. We could observe real time data and make decisions on what to do with that data, increase the furnace temperature or not. This system would also have an impromptu intellect that helped us reduce the second time and the saving was reduced from an average second time of 21 days to an average time of 17 days. It is a four day saving in a batch production environment."

On why there is a need for digital transformation, Dhaga added: "In the domain where we don't have much integration, there are teams that study these processes and try to do it manually. If you download data from excel, that is not real time data because after you download new data, by the time you study that and by the time you come to the conclusion, that data is already one month old. Meanwhile, the plant has moved on with new data. So any initiative that you take to drill down an employee's application is not very current because data has changed over that period of time. So really speaking, the initiatives drive to excellence but they are not able to get really more than a couple of percent to achieve 15-20%. The only answer is digital transformation and that's where the meaning of operation excellence comes in. It is the ability to address your challenges from the view of increasing revenue; managing spending; minimizing and mitigating risks; managing productivity, and human activity."

"Operational excellence is the only way to achieve official excellence judgement through digital. The only way you can make it happen is by going in for a great enterprise class digital transformation platform. Something like PI system is one of the most powerful platforms that can pick this up. That can transform the data in a contextualized manner, give meaning to the data and turn it into intelligence and information. It is basically going to collect, store, contextualize and help you visualize. The moment you are able to see the plant operational data, you can tell what happened in the company. When we deployed the system, with the first golden batch, we started using that visualization system for finding faults and to look at why a particular incident took place and because now everything was clear, it resulted in a great amount of collaboration. Earlier silo teams would keep blaming each other sitting in the large meeting with no conclusion," Dhaga informed while comparing the importance of the right solution for data utilization.

"At end of the day when you look at digital transformation, the whole idea is to have a single source of truth across your entire manufacturing ecosystem," said Dhaga while backing it with examples: "It is very important that you go for a platform’s ability to have a single thread of data and unified data so that not only visualize your data at an enterprise level but also to do many other things like converging information technology, engineering technology, and operation technology. The first part is engineering data and second is engineering technologies. One of the biggest challenges in the chemical sector is a component called technology transfer. For example, we have our kilo plant and pilot plant at Udaipur. We do something in the kilo plant and then update the technology at pilot plant and produce 100 kg. When the engineering process is good, the technology transfer is smooth.”

Sharing the latest trends Dhaga added: “The players need to go in for an enterprise class platform because it will love the analytics visualization, as per performance, utilization production, optimization and planning. The planning, and scheduling is huge daunting task. Due to market demand, the plants are producing batches between two batches. So, if you want engineering to produce another product very quickly, scheduling and planning is complex subject, and the moment you have engineering technology embedded, it is able to simulate and do very well in that window of time that you have before the other batch of the other product comes. So for so great possibilities unlock with the ability to monitor control, automate visualization etc. With AI in place, in terms of future operations, you will have full visibility and official awareness. You will have an amazing ability to control how your assets are utilized, how they perform what the health is and optimize utilization of your assets. You can optimize the production cycle and, therefore, each of the factors such as energy and resource utilization etc. will always be taken care of.”

“Digital transformation will come at a cost but it is your mindset. It is not actually a cost but an investment. The moment you invest in digital transformation, you are going to get an ROI. The first step could be a smaller one with a a small plant with a small use case. First get confidence and then move forward to the larger zones. With the availability of cutting edge data, the four words actually become important, i.e. capture, store, contextualize data to intelligence and action,” concluded Dhaga.

Themed ‘Connected Chemical Plant and Industry 4.0’ the CIO Connect 2024 was held in association with AVEVA and Grassdoor.