Speeding up digitalization in complex process industries

When I first joined Outotec in 2015, one of my first tasks was to co-lead our digitalization strategy development. We probed widely in minerals processing and metals refining industries and came to the conclusion that digitalization was high on the official agenda, but in reality efforts were focusing on the low hanging fruit – mining came before concentrator plants and metals refining, simply because it was simpler. It meant data collection and further automation on an equipment level, for example, optimization and automation of dumper trucks, applications on high wear and tear component predictive maintenance, and some remote monitoring, again mostly at an equipment level. When it came to more complex processes, such as the concentrator plant, or e.g. an alumina refinery development was lagging. Automation was and is there, but using big data analytics to optimize e.g. product quality, energy consumption was vaguely only being talked about.

Now, some years later, as my primary focus is on alumina and aluminium, digitalization is talked about in every customer meeting I have. Corporations have set out on Industry 4.0 programs and everyone is supposed to talk about them. Yet, probing more deeply, many of our customers are still missing out on the practical applications. This is largely due to a mismatch between different parts of the value chain:

Our customers have to piece together their process plants (e.g. alumina refineries, aluminium smelters) from a multitude of different technology vendors, often with the help of an EPCM / engineering company whose primary task is to execute the capital investment project on time and to budget, placing less emphasis on the operations afterwards. It’s therefore up to our customers to piece together their digital platforms and trying to integrate the data collected by a number of different equipment from almost as many providers.

How to speed up things? I believe there are several things operators can do:

1.  Maintain tight dialogue between the “corporate agenda” and what the operations teams require and see as potential benefits
2. While working on the bigger architectural questions, Have an open mind to working with vendors on the practical solutions. The final architecture doesn’t necessarily have to be all figured out before starting to use some of the practical applications.
3. Pilot with practical applications bit by bit – these can later be integrated into the larger road map. It’s important to bring several parties to work collaboratively; the concept of what we’re trying to accomplish in each application needs to be clear, but the exact details of the business case may, in some cases, only be verified along the journey

Find out more on my thoughts on the topic in this article – Part Of Outotec’s New Aluminium newsletter. I also welcome any thoughts and feedback!

https://www.outotec.com/company/newsletters/aluminum-insights/speeding-up-digitalization-in-complex-process-industries/