(177d) Leveraging Digital and Factory Automation with Help of a Centrally Located Integrated Plant Operation Centre Outside Plant Premises.

In line with Factories of Future, leveraging digital and factory automation, it is imperative to establish a near site unified command and control operation. With an emphasis on synergy, agile working, cross learning, faster and effective decision making and better coordination amongst all control stations, it is now being proposed to transform all control rooms to a centrally located integrated Operation Centre. This transformation will be instrumental in future autonomous operation of Plant.

Uniqueness
: Delinking Talent from Assets Due to the nature of theIron Making value chain, factories are typically in remote locations,where the best of talent might be scarce and operational hazardsare many. By separating the operations control from shopfloorprocesses, Tata Steel has laid the groundwork to ensure thatgeographical boundaries do not limit availability of talent, process,safety, environment and work can move anywhere than vice versa.With talent delinked from asset location, expertise is transferredremotely, ensuring rapid and efficient deployment of best practiceseven when new plants are set up. Operations, Safety andenvironment have also become safer with lesser people deployednear hazardous zones ✓ Technological enablement ✓ Real timedata feed (voice, video & data overlay in unified layer) ✓ FaultTolerant Architecture through distributed computing ✓ EdgeCluster and Cloud leveraged, digital twin and analytics enabled
Business Connect :
It helped in overcoming from followingshortcoming of traditional plant control (through separate control
rooms):
a. Limited visibility to incoming raw material. The visibility isprovided through periodic lab reports provided by scientificservices. Real-time pile quality is not visible in Pellet Plant
b. Communication gaps regarding breakdown among differentunits (Pellet Plant, Sinter Plants & RMBB, and among the differentunits of Sinter plants & Material Despatch Control Room) leadingto delayed action, thus productivity loss.
c. Decentralized operation planning among agglomerate plantsleading to siloed decision-making.
d. Enhancing knowledge transfer and developing a multi-skilledpool of shared human resources among agglomerates plant.
e. Enhancing safety of field operators by digitally enabling thecontrol rooms through CCTV footage in critical areas and reducingman-machine interactions.
Impact:
Reduced number of incidents in dept Savings of 35cr peryear Agile decision making, faster deployment Synergy and crosslearning Benchmarking with all Sinter plants across India AchievedBest ever productivity & Stack emission. Reduction in Solid fuelrate by 5kg/tns