India’s industries continue to march along; and Jeff Daniel learns about one of the companies supporting this expansion.
In 1999, two industrial giants joined forces to create a truly enormous industrial giant that had, at the time, over 120,000 employees in just about every corner of the globe.
Go back 100 to 200 years and you find products as diverse as diving helmets and rubber tyres among its roots. Along the acquisition path, the two constituent companies of Siebe and BTR collected subsidiaries involved with just about every conceivable aspect of industry. However, a great emphasis was always placed on instrumentation and control which today have been marshalled into Invensys Operations Management—one of the three divisions of the modern-day business. In the financial year 2009 to 2010, Invensys Operations Management reported sales of approximately $1.5 billion, or about 45 per cent of Invensys’s total revenue.
These days, Invensys is a much slimmer version of its previous self; yet a list of its credits cannot fail to impress. On a global basis Invensys helps generate 20 per cent of the world’s electricity and 36 per cent of the world’s nuclear power. It helps produce 70 per cent of the world’s liquefied natural gas and refine 17 per cent of the world’s crude oil. It serves 23 of the top 25 petroleum companies; 47 of the top 50 chemical companies; and 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers.
And one of the most important areas of operation is centred in India, where managing director Vijay Srinivasan oversees a 600 strong workforce serving the burgeoning economies of India and the rest of Asia—including its main rival, China.
“Traditional automation systems,” he argues, “were designed to control plant efficiency based on highly stable business variables that only changed over long periods of time. Today’s business variables—energy for example—are fluid, often changing every hour or even minute, obviously having an impact on operating costs and bottom-line profits. With the emergence of real-time business variables, traditional automation and control systems are no longer up to the task and many businesses are finding it difficult to meet their production and profitability goals.”
To fill this vacuum, Invensys Operations Management is marketing a new approach to help clients achieve operations excellence in real time. By developing and delivering real-time control solutions that address each client’s most pressing production dilemma at plant and business level, Invensys believes it can help extract efficiency and profitability from all industrial assets.
Additionally, by helping to unify and integrate layers of control, automation and IT systems, Invensys can also help drive continuous productivity improvements from all plant and operations personnel that have a direct impact on the performance of the industrial operation, as well as improve safety, security and the environmental impact of the operation.
Invensys products and systems are being used by more than 40,000 clients at more than 225,000 plants and facilities in more than 180 countries. In total, the company has approximately 9,000 employees and a global network of more than 3,000 partners whose role it is to integrate Invensys services and solutions to help clients collaborate across systems and enterprises in real time. These solutions are designed to extract critical data to make faster, better decisions and synchronise customer operations from the plant floor to the executive offices, aligning production goals with business objectives and improving the sustainability and profitability of their assets.
“India’s manufacturing industry,” says Srinivasan, “which is driving the country’s GDP growth, is undergoing a major transformation. It’s moving away from growth spurred by demand to growth driven by productivity. India’s manufacturing is scaling up and beginning to seek global competitiveness through the wider application of automation and manufacturing IT. Manufacturing companies are under tremendous pressure to deploy their resources efficiently and are forced to look for cost reductions across the supply chain and through the entire plant lifecycle.”
Enabled by its industry and production expertise and accelerated by an open software platform, Invensys Operations Management’s flexible approach blends automation and information technologies, services and expertise into effective solutions that solve problems and optimise the profitability of operations—from single plant devices to entire plants and multi-plant locations.
The company’s blend of patented products and tailored systems is helping clients measure and control production value, energy cost and material cost and then optimising them within the constraints of environmental and safety issues.
In previous guises, Invensys Operations Management has had operations in India for more than 30 years, and has steadily grown its business since. It has its headquarters in Pune—150 kilometres inland from Mumbai. To better service India’s single largest refining hub, Reliance Refinery, a service office exists in Jamnagar. Other branches are located in Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore.
India today houses Invensys Operations Management’s global engineering centre, building on the country’s international reputation for IT expertise.
Although economic growth is the primary concern amongst Asian countries, Invensys also contributes much to improving environment standards with solutions for waste reduction, pipeline leak detection, water management, chemical recovery, combustion management, carbon tracking and much more.
Invensys’s internal record demonstrates that it practices what it preaches, making it an ideal partner to help industrial companies develop and execute environment and safety excellence strategies. Invensys’s internal sustainability approach and programme exceeds every one of its five environmental key performance indices (CO2, energy, water, non-hazardous waste and hazardous waste) and in the period 2008 to 2009 claims to be the only company in its peer group to have been recognised and listed by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the FTSE4Good, the Global Compact and the Carbon Trust as a leader in sustainability.
Invensys Operations Management realised a 13 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions, a 22 per cent reduction in total waste generation, produced 24 per cent less hazardous waste and used 25 per cent less water, as well as 12 per cent less energy. On the safety front it had a 45 per cent reduction in total recordable case incident rate. All brought about, naturally enough, by using its own Invensys sustainability software in its factories. www.invensys.com
