Vedanta invests big on Industry 4.0 and digitization, to stay ahead of the game

Vedanta, the multi-billion dollar mining and metal Group invests big on industry 4.0 and digital technologies to stay relevant in the metal industry.

The demand for metals is growing continuously, as the global population rises and aluminium stands as the second most essential metal in the world. The metal industry plans to invest significantly in digital operation solutions over the next five years across the globe. However, this investment is rendering into a progressively advanced level digitalization and integration, and the outcome of it is substantial operational cost savings, safety, and sustainability of the business as well as social inclusiveness.

The companies in the metal industry are counting on Industry 4.0, besides from digital technologies. The technology empowers manufacturing heightened connectivity and automation to add value to operations and products and to develop new kinds of offerings to address their markets, as this is the call for the aluminium sector in India to sustain and reinvent itself.

Vedanta Ltd - Aluminium & Power, being India’s largest Aluminum producer can never go out of business and has to corroborate operational continuity even during the lockdown. The company has put industry 4.0 and other automation technologies as a priority in their business tech strategy.

Avijit Deb, CDO, Vedanta Ltd - Aluminium & Power Business said: “We were already well into our journey of automating and digitizing our operations and the pandemic accelerated the deployment and more importantly, adoption by users. Technology deployed at our plants links various stages of the supply chain into a robust IT-enabled ecosystem. Our Industry 4.0 setup allows the manufacturing operations to gather and analyse data from across a wide range of activities and from partners, suppliers, collaborators, end-users and end-customers in ways that enable faster, more flexible processes to produce higher-quality output, sometimes highly customized at reduced costs.”

The structure which incorporates cyber-physical systems (OT-IT), industrial internet of things (IIOT), cloud computing, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence has moved from being a ‘nice to have’ or augmenting capability for the aluminium industry to something that is now awfully important for differentiation and is becoming a disruptive force. It is delivering supply chain agility, deeper process understanding, and higher production utilization.

Vedanta is allying with premier educational institutes, global R&D organisations and start-up companies to incubate and co-develop Intelligent Automation and Industry 4.0 Solutions. It has developed technology Innovation Centres in the plants to democratize innovation across rank and file and fuel more initiatives across the organisation.