Specialized Team at Hindalco Drives Transformation

An industry leader in aluminium and copper, Hindalco Industries Limited is the world's largest aluminium rolling company and one of the biggest producers of primary aluminium in Asia. Its copper smelter is one of the world’s largest custom smelters at a single location.

Complexities in existing processes, siloed data within departments, inefficiencies due to labor-intensive processes, and lack of real-time visibility into operations led Jagdish Ramaswamy, Chief Digital Officer, and his core team of experts to find a new way to drive digital transformation at Hindalco.

Digital Transformation

Regardless of size or scale, the day-to-day challenges faced by heavy industries share commonalities – maintaining productivity, quality, low cost, and a skilled workforce, just to name a few. Embracing digital transformation can reshape operations allowing for more agility and responsiveness.

A solid operational foundation and smart strategies can prepare an organization like Hindalco for better adoption, future integration and ultimately growth.

A solid operational foundation and smart strategies can prepare an organization for better adoption, future integration and ultimately growth.

Digital Council and Ambassadors

For Hindalco, it could take days or weeks at some facilities to extract data from OT systems. This increased time to complete any analytics initiative to optimize processes. In turn, this delay in analysis impacted production.

Ramaswamy and his leadership team formed a Digital Council, with a few functional experts from across businesses to steer the digital program across the company. 

This small but mighty team of 10 wanted to:

• Create smarter plants by providing real-time visibility into operations and KPIs, and data access without barriers, and use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve asset reliability and product quality.
• Improve supply chain efficiency by optimizing logistics cost through ML and price forecasting models to optimize procurement cost.
• Develop a digital savvy workforce and delight employees by deploying cutting edge technologies. 

Use Cases Across the Value Chain

As a small steering team, Ramaswamy and his team realized the importance of partnerships, both internal and external, to execute with relentless focus. A full list of use cases was identified across the entire value chain of the business and projects were planned accordingly.

The Digital Council empowered functional groups and front-line managers to direct specific aspects of the program, including the Manufacturing Center of Excellence (COE), Sourcing and Procurement, Finance, Legal, Information Technology, Quality, Sustainability, Logistics, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain and Operations, Risk and Compliance, Maintenance and Human Resources.

One of the most critical success factors for Hindalco’s digital transformation was recruiting Digital Ambassadors, early career professionals from across all functions, to help increase the adoption of a digital culture.

Digital Education and Immersion

One of the most critical success factors for Hindalco’s digital transformation

was recruiting more than 75 early career professionals from across all functions, called Digital Ambassadors. Through digital immersion sessions, this team helped to increase adoption of a digital culture. Sessions covered how to use digital transformation to solve problems, use capital approval processes to articulate the reason for investment, and identify and communicate ROI.

“We started a program called DISHA: Digital Shiksha. Shiksha is a Hindi word for education,” explained Ramaswamy. “Our partners helped teach our people how technology works. Over the last 2 years, we have done more than 15 digital immersion session for more than 800 people to spread awareness and educate our users on the value of digital technologies for the business.”

Working with a trusted advisor and aligned teams is a significant success factor in digital transformation. Hindalco shared several examples of data-driven improvements and business benefits:

• Business Case: Coil quality is known only after results are published hours after the sample is taken from the end of the coil.
• Digital Solution: A Machine Learning model is suggesting optimum levels to operate the process, improving on-time delivery, reducing nonconformance percentage and removing process deviation.
• Business Case: Improve smelter processes to reduce production costs.
• Digital Solution: Digital twin-based analytical model identifies critical factors that contribute to the efficiency improvement and offers recommendations that already have improved production 1% across hundreds of pots.

Process Support and Justification

Ramaswamy and the team developed concrete processes to measure benefits and offer data for financial justification.

“The method of justification is done through a process called Capital Approval process that clearly articulates the reason for investment and the ROI,” he said. “I consciously drive the benefits with both tangible and intangible aspects as well as measure the cultural change at the grass root level of adoption of digital technologies.” 

Ramaswamy and the team encouraged ideas and said that the start of projects could come from minimal initial approvals, to encourage a stream of ideas. “There is no fear of failure because we are encouraging many experiments across the organization, with a ‘fail fast and scale fast’ approach,” he said. “We fund ideas that are aligned with our digital transformation business plan and that build on basic and core process standardization.”