Presenting ARC's Eighth India Forum
Achieving Business Excellence through IT and Automation Solutions
July 14-17, 2010 - Hyderabad, India
Over 400 Delegates Attend ARC's Hyderabad Forum
ARC's eighth India forum attracted over 400 delegates from technology solution companies and manufacturing industries. They shared their perceptions about winning strategies, best practices, and achieving business excellence through IT and automation solutions and deliberated upon the technology adoption roadmaps in their respective plants.
The first two days were devoted to the electric power industry, while the last two days focused on process and batch industries, such as chemical, oil & gas, cement, metals & mining, pharmaceutical, and food & beverage. The forum also included a session on asset management and sustainable manufacturing. Almost 60 speakers comprised of industry thought leaders shared their thoughts and experiences through presentations, panel discussions, and personal interactions with C-level executives about manufacturing IT solutions that help companies emerge best in class.
Driving Innovation, Sustainability, and Performance of Electric Power, Process, and Batch Industries
The inaugural session gave captains of India’s automation industry an opportunity to come together and deliberate on the roadmap for the electric power industry in India. 
Andy Chatha, President and CEO of ARC, set the tone for the day's sessions by deliberating about the impact of developments in the smart grid domain on the electric power industry. Globally, there is interest in building smart grids because it is the right thing to do; but each country is at a different stage of development. Biplab Majumder, Vice Chairman & Managing Director of ABB India, spoke about how the growth of the Indian economy is dependent on the growth of the country’s electric power and water industries. He laid out a roadmap for the electric power and water industries to deploy technology effectively to be able to meet the country’s requirements. V.V. Paranjape, Director and Member of Managing Board of Siemens and President of the Automation Industry Association of India, presented his thoughts on the integrated automation approach that will help the industry improve manufacturing productivity, flexibility, and efficiency. Vijay Srinivasan, Managing Director India Subcontinent of Invensys Operations Management, discussed the need for manufacturing companies to have "business control rooms" to empower them with real-time actionable information to be able to respond with agility to market demand and cost dynamics.
Roadmap for the Electric Power Industry
Following the keynote addresses, N.K. Srivastava, M.K. Srivastava, and A.K. Sinha of National Thermal Power Corporation, the largest utility company in India, gave an overview of India’s electric power industry and projected an investment of $1,300 billion over the next 25 years. Rajabahadur Arcot, Vice President and General Manager of ARC India, spoke about the need for India’s electric power industry to leapfrog and build its growth strategy to include distributed generation and smart grid technologies. The morning session concluded with an interesting panel discussion on the roadmap for India's electric power industry.
In the post-lunch session, Gururaj Bengeri of Siemens PLM Software, spoke about project lifecycle management for energy and utilities, and N. R. Kamath of ABB covered the topic of instrumentation, control, and electrical strategies for electric power utilities and captive power plants (CPP).
Legacy Automation Systems: Need for Technology Audit
In the evening session, Naveen Vashist of Rockwell Automation, spoke about the automation strategies for CPPs. While the optimum performance of the 21st century’s integrated power plant was the theme of Invensys Operations Management's presentation by Shripad Lale; N. K. Srivastava of NTPC, spoke about the issues and challenges of aging automation systems and related migration issues, including the techno-economic viability. Rajabahadur Arcot highlighted the need for companies to carry out technology audits periodically to assess the impact of aging automation systems.
Smart Electricity and Smart Grid Imperatives for India
On the second day of the forum, the morning session focused on transmission, distribution, power generation from nonconventional sources, and smart grid solutions. The afternoon sessions included interesting presentations on asset management and sustainable manufacturing.
Uday Kale of Reliance Energy spoke on how the company successfully leverages technology to emerge as a leading integrated power utility company in India. Sandeep Sinha of ABB presented his thoughts on smart electricity, which encompasses augmenting the existing generating capacity in a sustainable and energy-efficient manner without compromising reliability. SUPCON’s Ji Yong spoke about converting garbage and waste into electric power with the help of incinerators and their control systems. Anjan Banerjee of ABB discussed managing electrical systems successfully to reliably meet the demand for electric power without compromising on grid discipline.
Santhosh Nair of IBM traced the evolution of the Smart Grid Maturity Model, developed by the collaborative efforts of IBM and a group of leading utilities. Sudeep Edakkattu of Honeywell looked at these evolving concepts from India’s perspective and laid out the smart grid vision for India.
Asset Lifecycle Management Imperatives
ARC’s Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) model covers project performance management and asset performance management. Andy Chatha emphasized the importance of asset lifecycle information-management, segmented further into project information management and asset information management. Dr. Gunther Kegel, CEO of Pepperl+Fuchs, shared his thoughts on how innovation in intrinsic safety technology improves plant asset lifecycle management. Trinadh Dwibhashyam of ABB shared his thoughts on real-time measurement of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), implementing reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), and the role of automation. In their presentation, Naveen Vashist of Rockwell Automation and Ketan Merchant, Master Consultancy, addressed the vexing issue of DCS migration that confronts many end users.
Process and Batch Industry Strategies
On the third day of the forum, Dr. Prashant Pradhan of IBM, flagged off the strategy session. He spoke about treating asset management holistically to unlock measurable and sustained business practices, which may otherwise lie as unused data. Madhusudan Varadraj of Siemens PLM Software spoke about the multiple islands of information that impact new product introduction time and about delivering business value from the ideation stage through product excellence and process excellence.
Integrating process and power automation was the theme of the presentation made by Hakan Nytorp of ABB. He stressed the importance of open standards for better interoperability and functionality. Naveen Vasisht of Rockwell Automation spoke about process and batch management systems and their architecture. He related the integrated architecture to ARC's collaborative process automation system (CPAS) model. Baban Bhuriya of Siemens traced the transformation taking place in process industries, speaking about collaborative manufacturing and its challenges.
Madhav Kalia and T.R. Ravishankar of ABB made a joint presentation on production challenges in a batch industry. The evolving business complexities make operations more challenging.
Industry Tracks
The specific industry tracks that followed were on pharmaceutical and food & beverage; cement, metals, and pulp & paper; and chemicals, oil & gas, including refining and petrochemicals.
Pharmaceutical and Food & Beverage Track
Shyam Bang, Executive Director of Jubilant Organosys, co-chaired the pharmaceutical and food & beverage track with ARC's Rajabahadur V. Arcot. Speakers presented their views and experiences about ensuring compliance and achieving operational excellence by deploying electronic batch record (EBR) systems, manufacturing execution system (MES), plant safety systems, process analytical technology (PAT), and quality by design (QbD), and others.
Cement, Metals, and Pulp & Paper Track
Ajay K. Dhir, Group CIO of JSL, India's leading integrated producer of stainless steel, chaired the cement, metals, and pulp & paper track with ARC's Badrinath Belgaumkar. Mr. Dhir spoke about sustainable green IT solutions for the industry. Apart from making the information technology solutions eco-friendly, information technology can also contribute to making the enterprise operations sustainable.
Chemical and Oil & Gas Track
Mr. Rajamani, former MD of MRPL, a large Indian refinery, chaired the chemical and oil & gas track with ARC's Prakash Anjaneyalu. In his keynote address, R. Rajamani spoke about the margin pressures, especially about the declining refining margins. It is imperative for chemical, petrochemical, and refining companies in India to pursue not only operational excellence as the goal but also focus on innovation.