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Overview
Today, manufacturing and energy companies face new, intricately intertwined challenges, such as decarbonization, 
international regulations, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in addition to the challenges of digital transformation (DX) efforts. AVEVA, which has promoted DX from the perspective of business operations and plant lifecycle management, integrated OSIsoft, a data management infrastructure company, in 2021. Under the new system, AVEVA organizes issues to be tackled in the future and proposes efforts to solve the issues for Japan’s process, energy, and infrastructure-related companies that have many users of OSIsoft's PI system.
Mr. Masaki Kogure, Vice President Sales Japan, AVEVA Japan K.K., gave a presentation in the Japanese track of the ARC Asia Forum 2021 highlighting the following issues:
- The importance of promoting DX is increasing in the manufacturing industry and DX efforts for business transformation are accelerating in companies around the world. Companies are also under pressure to promote sustainability efforts.
- DX promotion is effective for sustainability initiatives and the common language between them is data.
- It is necessary to sort out complicated problems, and there are also issues peculiar to Japanese companies that need to be addressed. In particular, decisions must be taken to prepare an environment for utilizing real-time data for the operation.
Accelerating DX Efforts
The world has changed a lot in the last few years due to the pandemic. Many things were born out of necessity that the 
new normal demanded, such as new ways of working and growth of new businesses. People can no longer return to the original world where there seemed to be waste, duplication and great excesses, from today’s viewpoint. The issues we are facing today are different but, on the rise, due to the increased connectivity that advanced technologies provide.
Recent industry research reveals that investment in DX technology and services is expected to grow at an estimated CAGR of 18.9 percent during the period 2021 to 2028. Mr. Kogure said, "As for business leaders, it is now a duty and also a business chance to realize a sustainable future by utilizing DX more quickly than originally envisioned."
Responding to Sustainability Requirements
In response to global climate change, many countries have committed to the Paris Agreement, which will limit global warming up to 1.5℃ and reduce carbon gas emissions to zero by 2050. In addition, water footprint reduction requires reducing freshwater usage in food production to improve wastewater treatment, and further reducing energy consumption while accelerating the shift to renewable energy.
Following these global trends, last year's Diet in Japan enacted the Revised Global Warming Countermeasures Promotion Law with the aim of realizing a carbon-free society by 2050. Many companies also have recognized an urgent need to deal with decarbonization and carbon neutrality. The buzzword sustainability is now the propelling force across global organizations.
Companies have already recognized and acknowledged that promoting DX is an effective means of strengthening business continuity during tough times in a pandemic environment. According to Mr. Kogure, the most important common language between DX and sustainability is data. "The data that is useful for sustainability efforts must be obtained by sharing problem awareness across organizations. It is necessary to create data that is not limited to partial optimization of the plant, but that covers the entire plant lifecycle and promotes sustainability."
Characteristics and Issues of Typical Japanese Operations
On the other hand, many Japanese companies express impatience and confusion. According to Mr. Kogure, there are three factors behind this: that is, human resources, culture, and demands. First of all, there is the difference in usage of human resources. In Japan, there are specialists with expertise in each department, and operators are among them. 
Unlike in overseas plants, where professional operators perform functionally determined operations exclusively, a wider range of knowledge and expertise are required for plant operations in Japan, and it is highly specialized personnel who actually operate the plant.
The second is the difference in corporate culture on automation. In overseas plants, the policy is to automate everything that can be automated. In Japan, on the other hand, plant management makes a distinction between the work performed by humans and the work to be automated. Certain parts of plant operations are planned and implemented from the beginning on the premise that they depend on human judgement in Japan. This ideological difference occasionally hinders the adoption of advanced solutions that are often introduced from abroad.
The third is the difference in requirements for the system. While overseas plants use pre-fixed templates, adjustable systems that meet the needs of users, including operators, are preferred in Japan. This change of system, modification, and flexibility required further complicates the process of deploying new tools and applications.
The Way of Sharing Issues
Organizing the issues based on the work in each department is essential. This includes categorizing each issue and identifying the overlapping issues with other departments. It also includes promoting collaboration between departments in areas of shared issues. For this purpose, the mechanism of collaboration between each department needs to be clarified, and a leader is required to promote its entire activities. Multiple departments need to communicate with each other to take measures. The common language there is data and numerical values. Hence, digitalization plays a particularly vital role. Mr. Kogure believes that there are five elements for the success of this initiative:
- Strong intention to change the current situation must permeate throughout the organization.
- Appointment of the promotion manager and granting of authority.
- Each worker must be aware of the daily, dynamic scenario and that the changes in one's own business can be connected to the corporate DX.
- Having a comprehensive view of the work and viewing the work at hand.
- Based on past internal experience and the latest know-how, the execution of the plan is to be reinforced with external best practices and new technologies.
Mr. Kogure explained that it is important for companies aiming for change to make effective use of various information obtained from both operations and engineering, and to place the company at the center of such information by creating a foundation of performance intelligence. Using technologies such as digital twins, Industrial IoT, big data, AI, connected workers, and the cloud is advised to provide digitized information to remote teams to support decision making and streamline collaboration and operations. A strong data foundation also helps optimize supply chains that can respond quickly, secure profits, reduce manual management to manage important equipment assets safely and reliably, integrate and analyze operational data with financial data, and improve decision making. The same process will be effective to provide insights when the issues include optimizing carbon emissions and energy usage.
Leveraging the PI System
AVEVA merged with OSIsoft in 2021. The integration of these two leaders in global industrial software enables the development of integrated products and lets AVEVA create an end-to-end, industrial digital platform that helps companies share critical information across engineering and operations.
Mr. Kogure said, "The PI System, which has a track record of utilizing OT data for more than 40 years, is now part of the AVEVA Group, and the data management infrastructure that is the key to supporting the SDGs has been strengthened. Supporting SDGs means that it is necessary to dynamically respond to numerous variable factors. That is, it is necessary to prepare an optimum solution using real-time data and further solve the problem. This will allow us to centrally manage various equipment OT data in the infrastructure industry and further utilize the knowledge of everyone in the process industry.”
Once data can be used across multiple organizations in real-time, various corporate decisions will become more agile. For example, utilizing operation management data and predictive maintenance data in the equipment department, it is now possible to automatically create legal environmental reports for the environmental management department of the head office, or energy usage status report of each factory. On the other hand, even long-time PI System users do not always make full use of the accumulated data. Mr. Kogure says, "I would like to ask if your company is in an environment where you can fully utilize real-time data. It is important how real-time data can be integrated and utilized ― in other words, whether it is possible to build an OT data infrastructure for real-time data and dynamically link its data to various IT applications that make decisions in real time.”
Conclusion
Mr. Kogure’s presentation in the Japanese track of the ARC Asia Forum 2021 drove home the point that companies must integrate and utilize real-time data to take actionable decisions. Inter-departmental collaboration and communication is vital for growth and sustainable success.
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Keywords: Digital Transformation, DX, Sustainability, SDGs, Decarbonization, Information Management, Performance Intelligence, ARC Advisory Group.