“Destabilizing factors such as geo-political, economic, change in demographics, and disruptions in supply chains are forcing the operators in chemical and other allied industries to change their operation models and also be agile. This has an impact on the way they are working and has also a huge impact on the bottom line. We have seen how a lot of customers have made investments in the digital space and automation during the last 15 years. However, they are yet to see the true benefits of connecting all of them. To address the same, we need to connect all the plants, processes, and people in the ecosystem so that operations are truly optimized,” says Anand Shankar, Regional Sales Leader (India), Honeywell Connected Industrial.

Anand Shankar shared his presentation titled, ‘‘The Last Mile-A System of Record For OT & Enterprise Data Management’ at the NextGen Chemical and Petrochemical Summit 2021 organized by Indian Chemical News on 7-8 October, 2021.

Pointing out the challenges, Shankar says, “As everyone would agree, a lot of operating systems, especially in the OT space are using sensors and a lot of data collection is happening but even today we are not processing that data to full extent. We are rather analyzing it in the manual format. Having made so many investments, what is then really holding us back? Despite the fact that enterprises are becoming more and more complex with a lot of regulations and processes, any change would require a lot of Capex investments. That is the reason why a lot of customers are delaying it. In the last 30 years, we have come up with various phases of industrial evolution such as Industry 3.0 or Industry 4.0. Customers have automated a lot of their systems and done asset performance management and process digital twins for stimulations. But what hasn’t happened is the proper contextualization across the enterprises.”

Talking about the solutions, Shankar adds, “This is where Honeywell has taken a leap. We are looking at Enterprise Management Solution as a way to bring in the System of Record so that customers can not only leverage the current but also their past investments as well. Through this they can take the decisions, not only to maximize their assets but also investments in their assets, optimize the processes and enable their workers. Sustainability is one of keys to optimize processes and plants. At the same time, enabling people is also important and a lot of customers are looking at integrating people with processes. Across the chemical industry, there are customers doing it at their sites to standardize and codify their knowledge by bringing in AI/ML kinds of solutions.”