By Pramodkumar Lakhmapure, Area Sales Director, Southeast Asia, AspenTech
Accelerated digitalization is transforming the process industry – comparable to how the sharing economy has democratized access to jobs and income. Home-grown Southeast Asian based mobile application heavyweights, such as Grab and Go-Jek, have shown how digital innovation has disrupted the land transport industry. These super platforms have democratized digital access to local populations and provided great value to customers. At the industry level, accelerated digitalization is impacting high growth industries via increased productivity in Asia.
Artificial intelligence (AI) gives process companies a competitive market advantage to advance strategically. According to MIT Sloan Management Review (USA), about 60% of industry executives believe that it is urgent for companies to develop an AI strategy and 87% believe that AI will help build a competitive advantage. As investor guru Warren Buffett puts it, “If you’ve got a wonderful castle, these are people out there who are going to try and attack it and take it away from you. I want a castle that I can understand, but I want a castle with a moat around it.” With the ability to transform businesses, AI can help strengthen moats for process companies.
Companies can also systematically increase productivity in a sustainable manner via the latest software – built upon existing technology infrastructure. Yet, digital transformation will remain elusive without critical changes in place. Workers need to be flexible generalists with the ability to think critically. The process industry has a reputational challenge with the younger workforce, as technical graduates tend to shy away from the hydrocarbon industry. With greater use of technology, companies can attract more millennial workers to address the current skills shortage situation. Workers can also be at safer, more centralized locations and be empowered to make more strategic decisions.
Digital innovation in fast-growth Asia
According to Oxford Economics, most of the top ten fastest growing emerging market economies are in Asia – with Thailand in seventh place; Malaysia in fifth place; China in fourth place; Indonesia in third place; the Philippines in second place; and India in the lead with 6.5% projected gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Collectively, the OECD has projected an annual growth rate of 5.2% between 2019-2023 for the ASEAN region. The caveat in this amazing race is the ability to transform digitally, with the economic engine in Southeast Asia at stake. Plastics and related chemicals are essential to increasing the production of end products, driven by demand from the burgeoning Asian middle-class populations. A spate of new multi-billion-dollar production complexes are nearing completion or being designed in Southeast Asia and India. This calls for an effective digital end-to-end software environment to empower workers and allow them to make complex decisions as accurately as possible.
This is where digital transformation becomes an urgent priority. Knowledge captured in intelligent software will help new technical workers get guidance in decision making, as well as keep plants safe and sustainable. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help workers decipher a treasure trove of data streaming off sensors in smart plants. Digital innovation can also help plants produce the right products at the right time, while staying safe and profitable. Integrated enterprises across the value chain and companies will bring agility to Southeast Asia and strengthen their market positioning globally. With the use of low touch machine learning, companies can deploy business generalists to make the best decision possible. As such, the industry is in a good position to tackle sustainability hurdles, which is the next big challenge for process companies.
Prescriptive analytics – heart of the bedrock
Industrial data continues to proliferate with the increasing use of intelligent sensors and the growing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Research firm, Markets and Markets, expects the IIoT market to grow from US$64 billion in 2018 to US$91.4 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 7.39%. Companies need to improve asset reliability via predictive and prescriptive maintenance techniques. Prescriptive maintenance is well poised as an industry game changer over traditional calendar-based maintenance techniques, which still result in random equipment failures. Thus, prescriptive maintenance offers companies an established alternative to analyse problems.
Prescriptive analytics focuses on a more holistic process by working out the root cause. In doing so, the industry recognizes that processes, activities and systems used in a plant are interconnected. Prescriptive analytics looks at data streams and pinpoints sophisticated signatures and patterns of data happening in advance of an event. With this approach, failure warning can be obtained up to 60 days in advance to tell the operator the root cause of the problem, pending problems, and what avoidance actions can be taken. The insights gained allow the operator to adjust its operating strategy and drive improvements in the plant or refinery. With more data gathered, the autonomous system learns on an ongoing basis.
In conclusion, the process industry needs to achieve operational excellence and invest in software tools in areas such as AI, machine learning, visualization, and prescriptive analytics. All of which form the bedrock for the next stage of growth, as companies capitalize on investments made by the industry in the past three decades. Disruptive technologies help revolutionize businesses and set in motion future growth by capturing the benefits of
digitalization today for more sustainable businesses tomorrow.