Orient Cement was looking for an IT solution that could meet real-time information, proactive and predictive maintenance and better decision making. Sudheesh Narayanan, Founder & CEO of Knowledge Lens talk about the Data Acquisition, Monitoring, and Intelligent Insights tools that helped the cement company achieve its goals.
1. How important it is for cement companies to embrace digital transformation? What is the current scenario in terms of IT implementation in cement industry?
Digitisation is key for cement companies, and it has been more of an urgent need than nice to have given the reduced manpower availability, potential disruptions in logistics, increased price competition, and the enhanced cyber security risk. The need to accelerate digitisation and sustainability to achieve lower operating costs, higher energy efficiency, yield, throughout and reduced carbon footprint is more than ever. Real-time information decision making, proactive and predictive maintenance are the key for better decision making.
Pandemic has just exposed numerous fragilities and vulnerabilities in many international supply chains for both raw materials and finished goods potentially disrupting production. It has also limited humans’ physical presence in offices, warehouses, and factories. There are factories which still perform data-driven operations with large staff, old legacy systems, and costly infrastructure.
We have been working with numerous cement companies on their Digital Transformation Initiatives and we see that in the last one year there has been a fundamental shift from proof of value to actual production implementations. The early movers are seeing benefits on the ground already.
2. Could you brief us about the big data platform and other IT initiatives implemented at Orient cement by your company?
Our client Orient Cement was keen to accelerate the digitisation journey by leveraging Industry 4.0 technologies to improve their Plant’s Operational Visibility and bring in Predictive Analytics for better operational efficiency. To achieve the overall predictive capabilities leveraging AI/ML, we needed a robust data historian that goes beyond the traditional tag-based historian. The dataset spanning longer duration of equipment’s operational data with a more granular frequency from each of their operating PLCs. Day-to day machine data needs an extended storage and at the same time being able to access the data in real time.
The key aspect was to provide an Industry 4.0 platform with an unlimited historian which can scale for large data which was leveraged to provide valuable insights and analytics for entire plant. The platform then surfaces critical KPI and analytics that enables operational visibility to every level of management. However, the biggest impediments for these digital transformation initiatives are the IT-OT security concerns and the need for a 100% deterrence towards cyber-attacks. So, we deployed the secured unidirectional information flow system using our Data Diode solution.
We enabled a real-time monitoring of entire plant from raw mill to cement bag packing in a web enabled SCADA, Analytical Dashboards, and Correlation Analytics to help their plant production team to make better decisions about the operations.
3. What challenges were the client facing prior to the implementation process? What was the company’s requirement from you?
Our customer Orient Cement is one of the leading, fastest growing cement manufacturers in India. The company has created benchmarks in the industry with the quality of its products from the time they began cement production in 1982 at Devapur. Orient has always been at the forefront of embracing innovation and they have been keen to see newer technology additions in their continuous growth story.
They were in a need of a robust Historian or an Archival store for at least 5 years of data which could facilitate a manufacturing data lake to facilitate historical analytics of the plant data for operational insights, anomalies detection and areas of process improvement. Analytical dashboards and proactive alerting were their key objectives.
Knowledge Lens as a “Valued Partner in Progress” implemented iLens – Industrial IoT Solution at their Plant at Devapur. We interfaced the Plant’s PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller) with in-built protocol support to perform real-time data acquisition of around 4000 parameters across multiple PLC Machines in 3 Units to monitor the assets, storage of historian data and a mechanism to backup, synchronise the data from plant network to corporate network in a secure manner. The data was stored in a highly scalable big data platform which served as a unified storage repository to perform monitoring and analytics.
4. What was the old methodology/platform they were using?
Their existing data store retained plant’s asset data for 3 months in database that couldn’t be used effectively for real time visibility. There were no capabilities for anomaly detection, predictive analytics, management KPI dashboards, etc. Most of the activities were manual and human intensive.
5. When did the project begin and end? Into how many phases?
Project was implemented in mid of 2019 and there are multiple enhancements done in subsequent phases as part of the digitisation initiatives. We are also working with them on various Plant Safety digitisation initiatives over the last 2 years.
6. What was the cost of the budget?
The implementation cost on the project is in the range of One-tenth of annual Maintenance cost of a plant. The benefits realised and ROI is well within 1 year of implementation.
7. Were there any challenges faced by the cement company during implementation process? Did you face any challenge?
Usually, such technology projects bring its own challenges, but we have been doing these projects over six years and majority of the challenges with respect to technology and solution were already addressed as part of the planning itself. We did the site visits and system study upfront and hence any site-specific challenges were addressed as part of those visits. During implementation, there were no challenges, and it went perfectly as planned. The system is self-service and hence after necessary training, the client team could do any changes they needed subsequently. So, we did not really see any challenges.
8. For new technologies, technical know-how is important. How was the upskilling done at Orient cements? What training was imparted to the resources?
As part of our iLens – Industrial IoT implementations, training and facilitating the shopfloor plant engineers and operators is a key objective in adoption of the Platform for Production operations. The success of our implementations is measured by the manner in which they are able to use and operate on the platform in a seamless manner. iLens Digital Assistant, Analytical Dashboards, Web SCADA are some of the solution components which makes the adoption journey seamless for our clients.
“iLens solution as a comprehensive IoT solution has helped us to simplify connectivity to machines, perform data acquisition, monitor and archive Plant Control room data for further analysis” - Gopi Krishan M, Deputy General Manager-IT - Orient Cement Limited, Hyderabad, India
9. What advantages did your solution offer to the client? Can you also share the numbers/figures of cost saving?
10. Was maintenance cost covered under the deal?
The annual maintenance contract along with remote support for any issues with iLens Industry 4.0 solution and for any on-demand help on Dashboards & Report generation from the iLens Industrial IoT Platform. Apart from this, we also provide them with regular updates on the overall product evolution as part of our Yearly product updates.
11. What trends do you foresee for cement industry in terms of IT implementations?
