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It is important for manufacturing organisations to get their priorities right when they undertake the all-important journey of digital transformation

Nanoprecise Sci Corp was an active participant in the recently concluded Pro MFG Technology Leadership Think Turf, where Founder and CEO, Sunil Vedula highlighted the key focus areas for the chemicals industry while adopting digitalization. Below is an overview of the virtual event that witnessed participation from industry leaders who contributed with their valuable inputs. The session was set rolling with an informative welcome by Sunil Vedula, Founder and CEO, Nanoprecise Sci Corp. While speaking about the significance of production uptime, he also underlined the role of machine health. The esteemed industry speakers included Atul Govil, Chief Transformation Officer and Head – IT and SAP, India Glycols Limited. Sharad Joshi, Head – Smart manufacturing, Asia, BASF, Pankaj Shrivastava, Head – IT, Gujarat Fluorochemicals Limited, and Anil Singh, Director – Operations, Sika India. The discussion was steered by Manish Kulkarni, Director, Pro MFG Media.

The panel focussed on the key objectives of digitalization, answering the questions on driving efficient operations improving profitability, improving bad cycle times & turnaround times, ensuring workplace safety for employees and reducing wastages. The discussion also steered towards the potential of digitalization to achieve disruptive transformations and its impact on value chains.

Looking to the future, Industry 4.0 journey has the potential to make a significant impact across most business areas of the manufacturers, by reducing unplanned downtime and increasing workplace safety. The panel shared how customer experience has evolved itself to a digital model, and how recent technological advancements have fuelled the Digital Innovation in R&D activities. They concurred that Chemical Manufacturing companies today, are at the start of their digitisation journey, with very few players seeing the full benefits it has to offer.

Different priorities at different stages

Highlighting the correlation between humans and machines, Sunil Vedula, Founder and CEO, Nanoprecise Sci Corp, said that we want the maximum out of our machines. “Yes, I will worry about the productivity aspect. But before that, I want to make sure that my machines are healthy,” he remarked. Explaining his thought process, he said that if machines stop all of a sudden, everything comes to a standstill. “So I need to ensure that my machines are always up and running. The next step is to make sure to tie this up to productivity. The big leap in productivity or the return on investment comes when you tie the improvements in predictive maintenance and predictability of the health of the machines to basically power consumption and GHG emissions.”

He further added that companies in the very early phase of digital transformation want to make sure that their predictive maintenance is first completely solved. Those who have achieved it want to make the most out of the data that they already have. “The third is the type of customers who are basically saying that we have everything in place and now we want to do productivity gains and so on. So, the priorities are different for everyone because everyone is at a different stage of digital transformation,” he explained.

Conclusion

It is evident that if the manufacturing sector is to realise the full benefits digitalization has to offer, there should be both more confidence in the benefits it can provide and an improved understanding of where these benefits can best be obtained. The need for successful case studies, demonstration facilities, reliance on experts & strategic partners and support for developing the employees’ skill-base will essentially drive the Industry 4.0 journey for manufacturers.

It was concluded that to achieve maximum benefit and transform operations, the challenges must be treated holistically through end-to-end application of modern technologies, thus fuelling the digital transformation journey of the manufacturing operators.


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