Keywords: Asset Information Management, Asset Performance Management, Operational Excellence, Roadmap, Rolta OneView.
Summary
Against the backdrop of gnawing global economic uncertainty, India's growth remains on track, largely due to its domestic demand-centric market. The country's growth opportunities beckon all, especially in a flat world witnessing major changes in economic dynamics. Many manufacturing companies today find themselves saddled with excess production capacities in their traditional markets. In contrast, manufacturers in India face supply-side constraints. While companies in India must invest to add new production capacities, they also need to take measures to protect their home turf from global companies seeking new markets for their products, be they aluminum, automobiles, or steel. The current growth dynamics in India require industrial companies to be agile, responsive, and continually improve asset performance.
In asset-intensive industries, one key to achieving operational excellence (OpX) is to focus on asset performance. Here, asset information management (AIM) solutions play an important role. AIM is vital to achieve operational excellence in the chemical, electric power, oil & gas, metals, and other process industries.
ARC Advisory Group and Rolta India hosted a well-attended seminar, Empowering the Enterprise to Achieve Operational Excellence, in Mumbai on January 12, 2012. Dr. Sid Snitkin, VP, ARC Advisory Group, presented the keynote address.
Dr. Snitkin's core message was that asset information management (AIM) and analytics are central to the operational excellence strategy of manufacturing companies, especially in the process industry segment.
Asset Information Management Helps Achieve OpX
After a brief welcome message by Dr. Bhot, Group Director, Enterprise IT Solutions Business Group, Rolta India, Dr. Snitkin gave the keynote address. According to Sid, operational excellence is fundamental for success in the process industries. Almost all leading companies have an OpX program that typically includes a broad set of financial, safety, environmental, product, and customer satisfaction goals. However, in asset-intensive plants, how well an organization manages its enormous investments play a critical role. Thus, asset performance management (APM) plays a central role in every OpX program.
Sid referred to the ARC research report that identifies poor asset information management as the root cause of many asset performance problems, such as poor asset utilization; low maintenance efficiency; high maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) costs; and others. ARC estimates the financial costs of poor AIM for a typical asset-intensive organization to be 1.5 percent of sales revenues — a staggering burden for any company today. Poor AIM increases the risk of safety, health, and environmental incidents, which can jeopardize an enterprise's very survival. Although adopting an AIM strategy brings immense business returns, especially in the long term, many organizations either do not recognize these benefits or assume that AIM can be deferred.
Sid explained that asset information is a "hidden asset." While fundamental to the company's performance, very few recognize this. To help compensate for unavailable or inaccurate asset information, employees often develop tedious, time-consuming methods to overcome these challenges, lowering overall performance. He highlighted that a reliable AIM strategy that ensures availability of quality information is essential to achieve real performance improvements. Sid also highlighted the important that analytics play in AIM.
A Comprehensive Solution for Operational Excellence
The Rolta team, represented by Anindya Chatterjee and Roopesh Nair spoke about the company's latest offering - Rolta OneView. Designed by domain experts from process industries, this solution captures enterprise- wide information from disparate sources, facilitates analysis, generates information, and provides visualization. According to Rolta, OneView is designed to integrate mission-critical information from various business functions and provide actionable information relating to operations, assets, supply chain, maintenance, sustainability, health, safety, and such others to all stakeholders at all levels — from the top corporate level all the way down to operating engineers and supervisors.
According to company executives, the scalable solution has analytics and calculation engines and can work with geospatial systems. For decision support, the solution can display actionable information and key performance indicators on dashboards, proactively encouraging knowledge management.
Roadmap to Pursue Operational Excellence
Rajabahadur V. Arcot, VP and GM, ARC Advisory Group spoke about the complementary aspects of Sid's presentation and Anindya and Roopesh's presentation. He highlighted how Rolta's solution fits well as an asset information management solution that could help companies achieve OpX.
To provide a historical context of India's current position relative to manufacturing innovation, Rajabahadur highlighted how the country missed participating in the initial era of invention and needs-driven manufacturing (steam engines, combustion engines, and such others) and the subsequent application-driven manufacturing era (radios, televisions, computers, and such others). To make up for these lost decades, India must leapfrog and enter the era of smart manufacturing in which innovation-driven, resource-efficient, and sustainable manufacturing leverages information as an additional asset. He said India is at the takeoff stage due to its demographic profile (by 2020 the median age in India will be 28), IT capabilities, and focus on renewable sources of energy. Rajabahadur briefly introduced the Kondratiev theory, according to which industrial growth is cyclical in nature and comes in waves; with India, in all probability, now riding the wave's crest.
He added that only companies that aim to do better than all the others all the time would emerge successful. In the process industries, the immediate task is to seek operational excellence by focusing on asset performance.
V.K. Sibal, Director Oil India (OIL), also spoke about the need for manufacturing companies to deploy enterprise solutions to manage asset information and performance. He complimented Rolta India for developing Rolta OneView.
Following the above presentations, Sid moderated an interesting panel discussion on asset information management and its vital role in the process industries' quest to achieve operational excellence. The panel members included S.C. Mehta, Director, Mumbai Refinery, HPCL; J. Sridharan, Head World Class Manufacturing, Aditya Birla Group; Sreeram Maddury, Vice President IT, Reliance Power; M. Thyagaraj, Advisor IT, ONGC; Raahil Burhaani, ex CIO Essar Power and Energy; Anindya Chatterjee, Rolta. The panelists deliberated on industry-specific approaches and implementation issues. The consensus was that asset information management empowers process industries to improve asset performance and achieve OpX. The panel members expressed the opinion that companies require a clear roadmap and AIM program implementation is not a one-step activity, but a continuous journey.
Conclusion
The ARC-Rolta seminar stressed the importance of AIM implementation and its long-term benefits in the process industries. ARC believes that implementing AIM technology solutions can improve an organization's performance in two ways: improving the quality of asset information and by improving the ability of asset management stakeholders to effectively use the asset information in their work and strengthen their decision-making capabilities. With India witnessing massive capacity addition in the process industry segment, ARC recommends that industrial companies here should leverage AIM solutions.
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