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At the 25th ARC Industry Forum, hosted virtually, many industry experts gave their perspectives on accelerating digital transformation in the post-COVID world. During the course of the Forum, Andy Chatha, President & CEO of ARC Advisory Group, interviewed Mr. Peter Terwiesch, President of Process Automation at ABB. Here are a few key takeaways from the interview. The video of the interview can be viewed here and/or on YouTube.
Challenges ABB and its Customers Faced During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In the interview, Mr. Terwiesch talked about the significant impact of the pandemic-induced lockdowns and “work from home.” During the pandemic, ABB’s customers realized that they couldn’t monitor plants onsite. This led to a lot of customers beginning to see the importance of digital transformation in helping them operate plants remotely. He said, “When you can’t get what you want, you have to get better at using what you have. So, if you can't get to the site, get better at using technology.”
How is ABB Helping Its Customers Transform Their Operations, Especially Plant Operations?
Mr. Terwiesch replied that digitalization provides significant opportunities, and a lot of people are talking about it. But it's not always so clear what the opportunity is. He believes that the opportunity lies in the operations data, which is only used to a maximum of 20 percent, and with the right toolbox and the right capabilities, there's a potential to improve operations to up to 30 percent.
Further, he said that this operational data resides in different systems and has different characteristics and may not be totally reliable. He added, “But when you actually recognize the pattern, then you know how to contextualize and normalize the data. Then suddenly, just like the moves you can learn on a Rubik's cube, with the right toolbox – and we call ours ABB Ability Genix (an Industrial Analytics and AI suite) – the problem of how to transform operations data into productivity is addressed. So we’re really excited about the impact we're making, and we’ve got very good feedback from customers.”