Cement and Construction

The cement industry is no longer a laggard in adopting new technologie. The revenue and margin-impacting benefits have encouraged the cement executives to use data to change the business of cement manufacturing and distribution. As the industry adopts Industry 4.0, they can better manage the enormous energy consumption, rising cost challenges, and overall process complexity that are inherent to the industry.

Predictive Maintenance – Cement producers can prevent extended downtime, avoid unnecessary damage, improve operational efficiency and reduce the maintenance costs. By equipping all critical machines with sensors that monitor in-use equipment conditions, aggregating the data from these sensors into repositories or “data lakes” and using ML algorithms to analyze historical data, this helps uncover the root causes of past failures and predict the future and likely sub-optimal or breakdown scenarios – estimate savings range upto 20% for this analytics driven preventive maintenance.

Predictive Quality – Using a combination of AI and ML algorithms, producers are enabled to correlate the quality of each production batch with the relevant production parameters. This predictive model can help identify the root causes of any product quality issue.

Digital Plant - Human-driven adjustments and decisions control rooms for changes in machine and process variables are prone to human errors and lack of real-time dynamic insights - the digital plant scenario software proactively helps run the process as close to the desired ideal set of parameters as possible. Digital plants have helped the cement companies realize benefits, including reduction of operating costs to the range of 15%, improved workforce optimization, lower maintenance costs and improvements in safety and working conditions.

Digital Twin – The cement companies are increasingly mirroring the entire production process through a digital “twin” of the plant’s physical assets, processes, and systems. By simulating the production process in a dynamic way, the Twin prescribes optimal equipment settings for achieving the plant’s quality and yield targets.

Key Focus and Solutions

Plant Operations Command & Control Center: Real-time management of operations for all plant activities, including equipment integration and mobile apps for real-time feedback of operations.

Digital plant: IT-OT convergence. Integrated view of plant performance, simulation & process anomaly detection.

Digital Process Signature Analysis: Identifying the process anomalies by analyzing the operations, process & quality data being collected (streaming data) and building algorithms to predict the quality variations, process deviations and energy consumption patterns.

Digital Shutdown Management: Shutdown planning optimization leveraging CCPM (TOC based) techniques. Shutdown activities tracking and execution leveraging wearable technologies and analytics.

Predictive Asset Management: Leveraging IoT, Predictive Analytics & Augmented Reality, TechM’s Rest of Life Algorithm helps companies predict the equipment failure much in advance and the AR Field Engineer App provides real-time access to Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), Equipment History, Videos & Documentation.

Supply Chain Analytics: Cloud-based analytics solution for freight utilization, enhanced E2E inventory visibility and lower cost to serve.

Mobility Support: Digital platform to engage in on-field operations, alerts on downtime possibilities and events, performance tracking.

Smart Logistics: Lower operating costs - automation and machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, supply Chain management and optimization, Fleet management for planning & monitoring powered by advanced telematics, enabling track & trace throughout the value chain.

Connected Workforce: End to end solution to ensure safety & productivity of the workers working at hazardous work places. Onsite support in real-time & on job training leveraging AR/VR/MR technologies.

Practice Highlights

• Dedicated Centre of Excellence for Process Manufacturing
• Supporting the leading cement & building material manufacturers in Americas, EU & APAC regions
• 25+ cement and construction material domain experts and consultants with global experience
• Strategic alliances with major vendors to provide cutting edge-solutions