Mr. B Narayan

Group President Procurement & Projects

Reliance Industries Ltd

After all the objective of digitization would be to achieve higher productivity, higher efficiency, lower plant downtime, effective maintenance and at the end of it make more profit for the company. Fortunately this is possible by implementation of digitalization in the manufacturing sector, For us to be able to derive the benefits naturally the infrastructure has to built-in , the plants have to be designed , engineered and built with this in mind.

Mr. Manish Chandra

Managing Director

Accenture Strategy, India

EPC in construction contributes about 13% of global GDP. However in the last 20 years, productivity in construction has increased only by 1 % annually which can be improved significantly by digitalization. According to one of the surveys, 93% of companies believe that digitization can impact every process across the entire EPC value chain, but the survey also indicates that less than 6% of companies have really leveraged digital to improve productivity.

Mr. Mohamed Takhim

CEO

ECOPHOS

We believe that with our process technology we can create very interesting synergy for phosphates in fertilizer industry and HCl in Chloralkali industry.

Mr. Jason Urso

Vice President - Technology

Honeywell Process Solutions

Digitalization has been underway in our industry for the last 30-50 year time. Over the time it has made profound difference in how we operate our plants, how we have better situational awareness, how we respond faster to any incidents in our facilities and how we operate closer to the process limits driving much better performance over longer periods of time.

Mr. Sanjeev Chopra (IAS)

Principal Secretary, Industries Department, Govt. of Odisha & Chairman, IPICOL Principal Secretary,

Industries Department, Government of Odisha & Chairman IPICOL

In 2015, the state government of Odisha announced vision for 2025 and identified chemicals & petrochemicals as one of the key areas that will drive the growth of the state in next 10 years and beyond. While many of states are facing pressure on infrastructure & logistics, things are different in Odisha as we are ramping up our facilities in the state. With most modern refinery of IOCL, 15 MMTPA capacity as the anchor tenant in Paradip the state has declared the area of 150 sq km around the refinery as the PCPIR region and firmed up the detailed master plan for development of downstream chemical industry in the area

Mr. Rakesh Verma

Chief Executive Officer

Simon India Limited

After a very long lean phase, the EPC industry has picked up and there are lot of projects that are happening or are at different phases of planning & execution. If one looks at the data, most of the projects run in cost and time overruns. Further, risk for the EPC players increases with the scale and complexity of the project. Though the industry is using digital tools in the stage of engineering design, by adopting these in procurement & construction to improve efficiencies, the industry can reduce the risks to a great extent.

Mr. Are Follesdal Tjonn

Senior Vice President – Software

Aker Solutions

Digitalization is data driven which further drives value in engineering & operations. My sincere belief is that we need to get control on all our data sources to be successful in our journey of digitalization. As an industry and as the EPC contractor we look at digitalization as an enabler to unlock and reuse the knowledge and experience of previous projects instead of starting from square one for our clients.

Mr. Navtej Garewal

EVP - Head of India

Aveva Information Technoloy Pvt. Ltd.

Looking from owner’s perspective that they need manageable product for manufacturing which helps then improve productivity & efficiency and is supported by digital twin, we have to develop our EPC systems and tool sets to enable that to happen. However, in order to provide to the owner the digital transformation that they need, it really depends on with their contracting strategy and with the technology solutions tools provider. The owners have to be very clear upfront on what they want and how they want.

Mr.Yatindra Borkar

Vice President-Project Support Asia Pacific and Engineering & Technical Expertise Hub India, A-FTA/S,

BASF Chemicals India Pvt. Ltd.

In last 20 years of my career, I have come across the projects that became cost driven, then became schedule driven, then they became reliability driven and operations driven. So how do you manage these complexities is an important task and can be related to digitalization.

Ms. Inge Wild

Program Manager Digitalisation,

Linde AG

From the time plant is build, the P&ID of the plant undergoes many changes. During our interactions with our customers, we found identification of right spare parts as one of the problem areas that our customers face were facing. They were not only approaching us for identifying the spare parts but also to send the new offer. So we innovated our business model by building a portal where the plant operators could access the P&ID of their plants easily identify the spare part as well as get the information of the suppliers to directly connect to procure the spare part.

Mr. Amit Verma

Senior VP & Head of P & C Digital Transformation

Reliance Industries Limited

Digital transformation is not about using technologies in business, it is about optimizing the same business matrix that haven’t changed over the last four transformations.The time you are trying to make sure that the project on construction side is completed on time; on commissioning side, you are hoping that every commissioning happens as you want it to be, once it is commissioned all the assets to be completely and reliably available, hence you are sweating them to get maximum output and then ensuring that output is at the maximum value that you can get in terms of revenue and profit.

Mr. Bertrand Langlois

Digital Transformation - Onshore / Offshore GBU

TechnipFMC

As an EPC contractor, we are focused on CAPEX and our goal is to move from the project ASAP from site after delivering the project to our customers who have to then operate the plant for the next 20 years. We are convinced that if we are involved in TOTEX that includes CAPEX & OPEX, we will deliver more value and this is now a part of our strategy that we are an EPC contractor but we are also helping our customers in operations and maintenance.

Mr. Suneet Prakash

Head, Group Projects,

Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt. Ltd.

We as project owners are very keen to engage with the companies that can enhance quality levels at site and complete the project with no incidents at the construction sites. But let me confess that we have had particle success in this. As an owner I can share that the biggest hitch that we come across is not the E, not the P but the C and that is where most of the projects go into the ditch.

Mr. S. Anantha Sayana

Chief Digital Officer

Larsen & Toubro

When we started with digital transformation, we decided that this was not going to be one of the experiments but it had to be pervasive, had to touch all the businesses and touch every construction site of ours and that’s what we set out to do. In thirty four months we created our digital department in construction headquartered in Chennai and decided to do this with speed, with scale and have a scope that would cover all aspects of construction and not confined to just one area.

Mr U. V. Phani Kumar

Chief Executive Officer

Howe Engineering Projects (India) Pvt. Ltd.

The boundaries between design & built, planning & execution and construction & operations are now vanishing as project implementation is becoming more collaborative. Implementing digitalization in construction requires right leadership with very clear cut understanding of digitalization, upskilling of human resources, trained to take calculative risks and mentored to adopt collaborative approach and adapt to the cultural and behavioural changes.

Mr. Vinayak Pai

President – Energy, Chemicals and Resources,

Jacobs

Sensors by itself cannot be the answer, it is about the data, which is something the EPC companies cannot do individually. This has to be in done with partnership with the operating companies who have the data. Most of the time when we design our solutions, lack of data rather than the lack of sensors, or lack of historical data is a challenge. Predictive maintenance, works on algorithms which need data from the operating plants of similar equipment if not the same. It is extremely essential for a service provider to know and to work with the teams of project owners to incorporate it in new asset. To have access to the data of similar system from the operating plant is very helpful in developing the system to collect the data over a period of time for predictive maintenance.

Mr. Sunder Kalyanam

Group Managing Director, Engineering & Construction Growth &

Chairman - Petrofac India

My answer to very pertinent question of project owners to the EPC players about how are they going to improve the plant or product that is delivered would be that EPC industry or EPC performers are integrators or service providers and not product manufacturers. It is the ultimate asset owner who must have a very clear cut definition of what he wants. Once that is known, for example if you want a Digital Twin, which should be sitting miles away and be able to pick up all the information from the hard asset sitting elsewhere with ability of machine learning, these would basically require data acquisition, data analytics, and feedback; and this process has to continue.

Mr. Akilur Rahman

Chief Technology Officer

ABB India

There is a difference between delivering a Digitalized Project & Digitalized Plant. As far as EPC is concerned, digitalized project is for internal improvement but delivering a Digitalized Plant, where you have all these assets connected with sensors, you can do the predictive analysis, you can also improve the uptime of the system and equipment, reduce the energy consumption, and also extend the life of the asset. It is already proven that sensors can give you clear data in terms of %age of benefits you can get. For example, motor sensors can reduce the downtime by 70 % and extend the life by 30%.