Leading chemical industry experts discussed the need for industry to accelerate its adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies and leveraging digital transformation to create smarter and agile operations at the E-conference organized by the Indian Chemical Industry on August 28, 2024.

The knowledge driven session titled ‘Accelerating Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation’ was moderated by Pravin Prashant, Executive Editor, Indian Chemical News (ICN).

Sharing the latest trends, Partha Sur, Sr. General Manager – Technology, Haldia Petrochemicals said, “The economic power is shifting heavily towards the end user side. Apart from that, the companies are focusing on digitalization, circularity and sustainability. The industry 4.0 includes all these things and the companies need to think about their priorities, moving ahead to capitalize the largest benefits. The first is the business model they are going to shape up, what kind of road map they are planning and how fast they are accelerating? This progress is in digital or other aspects of the business that the organization runs, be it innovation and growth that is the company is going to aspire. Second is the performance and cost optimization. The third and most vital is sustainability and circularity. In terms of using the technologies for best benefit, we have as a company systematically looked at the low hanging fruits where we can immediately gain the advantage automatically.”

“The basic things such as overall monitoring are from the digital infrastructure, and database. The production numbers, safety, gate systems, video analytics and all that. The machine learning exercise to monitor our overall downtime, locate the kind of errors etc. The user experience, talent management, optimization and entire value chain besides the ecosystem that you are building, we need to map these through step by step. This is where digital maturity comes in. We must start with the zero and then step by step scale up, that would be the kind of exercise that each and every organization would like to really enroll to get better and better. It is important to know that building value has to be step by step and will not happen overnight,” added Sur.

Rajesh Tripathi, Sr. VP - Projects, Engineering & IT, SRF Limited said, “The general perception within the chemical industry on digitization is that it will improve productivity and somehow may improve a little bit of efficiency. I will try to explain beyond it. There are two outcomes to the journey and we at SRF are experiencing it because we don’t have a continuous process plant but the batch process plant. In the batch one, you have 500 reactions and to find out whether it is cost effective or not, whether it will make some sense or not, companies approach different consultants. They find it more complex because these companies have evolved over a decades and have a different system. One plant is working on a different system and another plant on a different system. Their Q analysis are on different excel sheets and maybe having a historian without any analytics. The absence of complete knowledge will pose a challenge as to how to connect to all these sources and generate meaningful analysis, how to increase productivity, best cycle time, and improve quality. That is where functional experts come into picture."

“Chinese companies who learn from abroad, maybe the European companies have done it in a very systematic way.  Indian companies have done it during and after Covid as a lot of chemicals were being shifted from China to India. The customer wanted lots of products from us, and we sold them. But in the last one and one and half years, if you see the dumping from China is so much that you are not able to get the cost. Because despite raw material cost saved, operational cost is high and manually not possible further to reduce it. Hence, the biggest challenge is to find a way to do things in a cost effective way.  If you see the plant abroad, they don't run on manual mode.  The problem that Indian companies are facing is the lack of skill set to run the batch. If for a batch process, there are 100 people required and you have 20 plants, you may be needing around 1000 people. We need the skill development. Another challenge is that the cost of recipes is high as we are dependent on import of many control systems. Now the cost of import is very high and Indian companies have not developed so much that they can provide you this automation at a low cost. That is the major challenge for the Indian chemical companies. We need key counter measures such as innovation and reverse engineering,” added Tripathi.

Atul Govil, CTO & Head (SAP & IT), India Glycols Limited said, “We are extremely heavy on the resources which we consume, be it the plant assets or the raw material.  In most of the manufacturing setups, the chemical products have very high costs which means there is always a need to improve efficiency so that you get higher throughput from the same set of assets. You are able to defer your capital cost in terms of additional Capex to when you need to expand to meet the growing demand. So there has always been a need to improve efficiency, reduce cost. In addition, considering the green footprint, which is expected from companies like as a kilogram of output of a particular output or a particular finished goods, how can you optimize on the energy consumption being consumed? There is another aspect around product quality, which is how do you get products for the first time. These are the themes which have been there forever. Now with technology, IoTs of the world, the smart connected factory teams, which in our setup, we did to our advantage. We completed one major project before covid started and it helped us navigate the pandemic. We were able to maintain our operations because of the availability of remote connectivity to the control systems, which was available to our broad chain.”

“The current age work force does not want to work on mundane repetitive work such as check-listing, manual observations etc. They want to do everything through their mobiles and digital devices. Now imagine you have to hire someone and get them in the work force and tell them to work on these aspects. The legacy way will not work for such an organization. We have to use technology not just for the growth of the company but also to make sure that we remain relevant for the future workforce. We keep talking about Generative AI but we have to check which version would work best for us. We did some projects on advanced process control way back. At that point of time even we did not use AI as it was rule based but we derived a significant advantage in our process using that APC implementation for one of our large process control plant. We have to leverage AI not just in customer orientation or product design but also in real time applications. It may not need to be autonomous but feedback with the human in the loop is the key. And that's the essence,” added Govil.

Subhash Singh, CISO & Head Enterprise Architect, Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Corp Limited said, “The digital transformation or smart factory is no longer optional. In this competitive age, it is mandatory as in the coming years, companies who don’t adopt digital may get irrelevant in the market. I believe that nearly everyone on this journey is connected and we are collecting all types of data. When we talk about technology, we talk about internet of things (IoT), which comes into picture when we have acquired all data whichever is in the various equipment. People are utilizing the AI-ML and the foundation of any digital transformation is the data and will come through from a shop floor, devices. Therefore, IoT is the foundation part for it and then we collect that data to one of the central things. We talk about the historians where we can average data and already now it is getting used and there are other tools also which give you this data. We collect various data points when we talk about the temperature, pressure, floor rates, PH, humidity, and various all other parameters.”

“Optimizing your production, reducing down time and the product cost are the major things. The cost of production, accuracy of the model only depends on the data. We should have some platform that gives the trend of it and we can work on it, get various other parameters of analytics from that particular solution that is that is the major thing. There are various use cases from workers and if we have some issues in our plants, we can use this connected workers thing to get help from experts. We can also get various things which are happening into our shop floor which are on the paper and can be digitized. We can use digital twins in the chemical manufacturing for training. Other than that there are various user cases. If we want to have some training modules, we can use digital infrared for optimizing the operational efficiency and safety. As the new users, they are getting enrolled in our organization and we can give them training without going to the shop floor because they are not trained. We can train them in the simulated manner and then if we want to drive some innovation, they are very much useful for us," added Singh.

Sharing his thoughts Krishnakumar Pandey, Head - IT, Epsilon Carbon Pvt. Ltd said, "For operational excellence in the manufacturing organization, the process optimization involves efficiency, reducing cost and improving safety and sustainability. Putting IoT sensors on the critical equipment to predict their failure can save both planned and unplanned shutdown. That is something very easy for any organization to do and implement. The other area where AI is really helping in terms of your demand forecast, accuracy, because it needs data from multiple sources. It needs history, cell data, market trends.  If we use this data with the AI model, it will improve accuracy, help us in logistics, and reducing the cost of inventory. One more example is that most of the organizations are adopting robots to automate the routine mundane jobs and improve the efficiency on the shop floor. So, every digital journey or the operational excellence journey needs data. Data is as important as oil and it it takes maximum time for the organization to get that. If you have good data, your prediction, forecast accuracy, everything will be good. If you have bad data, then it will not give the desired outcome.”

“Collaboration and partnership are the key strategies for every manufacturing organization because it helps us to move up the value chain. And this brings transparency across the partners. They can leverage each other's strength which will help them to do faster innovation, improve efficiency, and create more value for the customers. For example, a digital transport management solution where the collaboration between the transport plant locations has been improved and it has really helped to give better visibility to the customer by putting a device on their truck which is carrying the material. Each stakeholder knows when the material is going to come, whether they are coming with the right condition on which it was supposed to be shifted. The skill development is also a good use case for the collaboration. While manufacturing organizations cannot get digital skills. They should partner with the technology startups and work together which will help them to innovate faster and which will help them to provide better experience to the end user,” added Krishnakumar.

Naveen Kumar, Vice President – Chemical Segment, AVEVA said, “There has been a significant impact of global events and geopolitical instability on the chemical industry. In such a scenario, companies need to balance their supply chain and collaborate with the ecosystem for better integration. That’s where the role of digital and artificial intelligence has become important for the future of the chemical industry. If we look specifically at the India market, there are a few challenges. Chemical utilization rates are still not full and we need to look at practical solutions. There is a need to diversify feedstock towards more circular products. In terms of pathways, we are looking at a larger focus on efficiency chemistry of the service, optionality creation and stronger commitment to sustainability. For achieving production excellence, rather than searching for technologies that are yet to arrive for net zero goals quickly, it is prudent to focus on low hanging fruit which is to monitor and reduce energy and fuel consumption. In our recent survey done along with the ICN, we found out that 66% of respondents in the chemical industry have placed operational excellence as a top priority in the next 12 months. 59% put productivity as a top priority. In terms of challenges, the sustainability and transition to net zero drops scored low as the issues such as raw material prices, supply chain logistics, customer requirements, and energy prices remained at the top. In terms of using the software solution to achieve operational excellence, 59% people listed data management as a top choice followed by process, simulation operations and production."

Providing a glimpse into his company’s India operations, Kumar added, “In India, we have roughly about 1000 engineers and 43% for global R&D capacity is based here, contributing to more than 70% of our products as well as monitoring of all our cloud solutions across the world. We have a delivery center which is in Hyderabad where we have experts across energy, power, chemicals, infrastructures, smart cities, consumer goods, and F&P. Recently, we launched an industrial intelligence platform with multiple elements. It provides a unified experience to manage all the AVEVA products and on premise applications. It can help you aggregate, contextualize and share real time industrial data with your partners and stakeholders.”

Most of the experts agreed upon the fact that the acceleration of Industry 4.0 and digital transformation in the chemical and petrochemical industry is not just a technological shift but a strategic imperative.

The E-Conference was supported by AVEVA was attended by delegates across the chemical, petrochemical industry and energy sectors.