The Self-Optimizing Plant Is Within Reach Posted on : Jan 11 - 2021

If you want to understand how the Covid-19 pandemic has begun to impact the digital-industrial revolution, one of the first things you should do is check in with AspenTech: the company’s mission is to “embed Artificial Intelligence throughout industrial manufacturing environments,” notably in the oil and gas, chemical and engineering fields. Their vision is to help customers achieve the “self-optimizing plant”, where AI helps to continuously adapt operations to maximize efficiency. They must have their finger on the pulse of the unfolding digital-industrial revolution – it’s their bread and butter.

Ron Beck, AspenTech’s Director of Marketing Strategy, points to the highlights of a recent survey they conducted with energy consultant Crystol Energy. Three insights jump out:

The first is the immensely increased sense of urgency: for all ten strategic priorities listed in the survey (which include diversity and inclusion, digitalization and other new technologies, operational and employee safety, optimizing operational efficiency, defending market share, expansion and investment, diversification of assets and activities, raising capital, improving competitiveness, and environmental, social and corporate governance), the share of industry respondents who rank them as “very important” has risen since the pandemic began – companies feel that the environment has become so much more challenging that they need to redouble their efforts across the board.

The second is that the rise in the perceived urgency of digitalization dwarfs that for all other priorities; it is the single biggest swing, with a 14 percentage point increase in the “very important” responses.

The third is that a shortage of skills ranks high among the companies’ top concerns for the next five years, and even more so for the longer term; in fact, for the longer term it ranks higher than trade wars, cyber security or more stringent regulations.

The skills shortage challenge and the digitalization imperative are closely intertwined.   An aging workforce implies that companies now suffer an accelerating hemorrhage of experienced workers with strong traditional industrial skills. At the same time, digitalization is transforming roles in the industrial world, so that companies need to acquire more software and data science skills but also build new skills combinations in their workforce. To give a sense of the speed of this adjustment, Ron Beck points out that across major energy and chemical companies, today nearly 80% of data scientists have been on the job for no more than three years; more than half have been on the job for no more than two years.

In other words, if you are an industrial company today, you have likely brought on board a number of data-savvy new workers in the last 2-3 years; they play an increasingly important role in your business and you must help them grow into their roles and learn the industrial side as fast as possible. At the same time, you need to make the rest of your workforce conversant with the digital side which is becoming pervasive.

Whether you can meet the dual challenge of digitizing your operations and quickly transforming your workforce skills will determine not just whether or not you succeed, but in all likelihood whether or not you survive. View More