AspenTech is witnessing a lot of growth in the chemical industry and at the same time, there is a growing onus on digitalization. "Given the fact that pandemic is still here and is going to stay no matter how much we want things to come back to normal. It has helped in pushing digital initiatives. Also, I think the workforce is getting younger and younger. Besides, the experience of the people is still important in terms of data that is available from the past. The demand and supply chain challenges will always be there and tackling it will depend on how we adapt our operations in a very smart way. Moreover, the sustainability goals are putting a lot of pressure on the companies, be it circular economy, carbon neutrality etc. The dilemma faced by the companies today is about both, drive growth and be sustainable also,” says Abhinav Chowdhary, Country Manager - Sales, AspenTech.

Chowdhary shared his presentation titled, ‘Digital Acceleration for Sustainable Growth in Chemicals’ at the NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals Summit 2021 organized by Indian Chemical News on 7-8 October, 2021.

As per Chowdhary, there is a need to look at the things holistically when it comes to start a digitization project.

“The design and Capex are key factors and have to be looked at optimally. Safety, flexibility, and minimizing energy consumption are important from an operational point of view. One has to remember that all the optimization efforts can go out of the window if the plants are not maintained. The equipment may go down and there are process upsets. So all those issues could be happening and take down operational margins of today’s plants. This is where all the steps have to be taken to maximize financial returns.”

“The domain knowledge and the first principle acts as a guide range and enables the goal of self-optimizing plants of the future. This is not to say that the future plans will be totally like driverless cars and without humans. Humans are very important to make plans and make cognitive decisions but because of more and more dynamics involved from sustainability and occupational safety, and also the demand and supply challenges, the features should be able to adapt to it," explains Chowdhary.

Sharing details about his company’s operations, Chowdhary says, “AspenTech has been around for the last 40 years, since it was born out of a project at MIT in the area of process optimization. As a company, we have evolved over a period of time and after technological innovations, the main goal we have set for ourselves is helping customers to accelerate their digitization journey, what we call optimizing their plants. Now this is a semi-autonomous plant where using the power of domain knowledge and power of industrial AI, we should be able to automate these processes.”