Kapil Agarwal, Senior Vice President and Local Division Manager, Process Industries, ABB India, discusses how advanced digital solutions are revolutionising the cement industry by enhancing operational efficiency, reliability, and sustainability.

How does ABB Ability™ Knowledge Manager help cement plants connect business KPIs to operations and optimise their performance?
ABB Ability™ Knowledge Manager (KM) is a true manufacturing operations management solution which, in a single platform, integrates data from operational, control, production, quality, downtime and business systems and converts data into actionable information.
At its core, ABB Ability™ Knowledge Manager offers industry-specific process and quality data warehousing, presenting information in a meaningful way. This single, powerful tool meets various needs: production information and downtime management, production scheduling, energy cost tracking and benchmarking, plant emissions monitoring and alarm analytics. Its user-friendly and intuitive statistical analysis tools boost both production and quality.
Statistical production analysis offers powerful tools to monitor quality-related process variables effectively. It helps verify if these variables are randomly scattered around the mean and normally distributed, and it detects variability and process changes to prevent instability. Some key tools we use include X charts (Shewhart), EWMA charts, CUSUM charts, histograms, and multivariable X-Y correlation graphs.
To enhance transparency across a plant or fleet of plants, our KM is available via a mobile app for smartphones and tablets. This allows plant and company managers to view operational performance anytime, anywhere. ABB Ability™ KM is highly scalable to meet customer needs, with flexibility for plant-level, regional, and enterprise-level deployment. It helps cement customers track processes, quality, operations, emissions, and downtime using standardised custom templates, IoT connectors and seamless ERP integration, all backed by excellent security policies.

How does ABB’s shift from reactive to predictive maintenance impact the operational efficiency and reliability of cement plants?
Predictive maintenance is a top priority in industrial IoT because it combines data, domain expertise, IoT platforms and AI. This combination allows manufacturers to predict anomalies in their plants. I believe, by using a modern asset optimisation system, cement manufacturers can shift from reactive to predictive maintenance strategies, avoiding unnecessary maintenance and reducing operating costs. This is achieved through the vast amount of data generated by smart devices connected in the plant, such as motor control centers, numerical relays, smart transmitters, and various asset models for motors, transformers, grinding circuits and conveyors.
ABB Ability™ Predictive Maintenance service leverages digital applications for quick detection of impending issues, root-cause analysis with recommendations, and assessment of severity levels and health indexes. It offers ready-to-use standard models that are easy to deploy and scale, helping to identify active conditions, assess health with severity and ensure easy deployment.

What are the key features of ABB’s AI-based Asset Performance Management (APM) suite, and how does it enhance asset optimisation in cement plants?
Predictive asset models can help cement plants operate with fewer workers, and to manage operations remotely. An APM solution, powered by predictive asset models, would give the remote teams full visibility into data that would tell them the health of all the assets in the plant. Think of AI-enabled APM as the most cost-effective way to extend the life of the aging (and newer) assets, to decide on the optimal timing for scheduled maintenance turnarounds (one of the biggest costs in a plant) and plan better. The new AI-based APM helps develop models, algorithms, dashboards and reports using a maintenance-oriented platform. It integrates with enterprise-level systems and evolves into digital strategic asset management. This makes transitioning from predictive to prescriptive maintenance and management possible.
ABB was approached by one of Asia’s largest manufacturers of grey cement, ready mix concrete and white cement. The customer has 19 integrated plants, one clinkerisation plant, 25 grinding units and seven bulk terminals. Working together with ABB domain experts, the company used maintenance-oriented algorithms that alerted the client to the potential failure of a particular part or electronic device, allowing it to perform predictive rather than reactive maintenance. Combined with a range of other digital solutions, including ABB Ability™ Expert Optimizer and ABB Ability™ Collaborative Operations, the customer was able to achieve ROI in eight months, a reduction in costs by 3-5 per cent and increase in the life cycle of assets. In this way, cement manufacturers can fully utilise the power of digitalisation to reduce energy usage and emissions, paving the way for the smart, sustainable and profitable cement plants of the future

With increasing digitalisation, how does ABB ensure the cybersecurity of cement plant operations and protect against potential cyber threats?
More and more cement producers on the digitalisation path would like to take a more proactive approach to cyber security. ABB’s analytics solutions and services continuously monitor, diagnose and resolve security issues, helping safeguard people, assets and reputation. Because technology and cyber threats can both change unpredictably, the strategy needs to be reviewed periodically, including performing simulations under different circumstances, like a major ransomware incident.
ABB realises that its customers are concerned about protecting against and minimising the risk of a cybersecurity incident. While asset owners have prime responsibility for any incident response procedures, ABB actively monitors for any cybersecurity threats that pose a potential impact to ABB control systems. All in all, ABB is well positioned as a systems integrator – a factor that is foundational to the company’s cybersecurity strategy in the industrial controls arena. There are two aspects to this. The first is that the customer can trust that implementation of a third party solution in ABB’s reference architecture will result in optimal value. The second is that the cement manufacturer can rest assured that if there is a failure or a problem with implementation, it will, in all probability, not impede the availability or safety of assets and will ease their recovery. ABB has been ensuring its customers by following the highest level of security policies during design, development, deployment and communications by adhering to the industry best practices.

– Kanika Mathur