The AspenTech Southeast Asia (SEA) team recently hosted an inaugural Breakfast Dialogue with Antonio Pietri, AspenTech President and CEO. The virtual event was attended by close to 40 executives from the region who came to hear about the “Self-Optimizing Plant in a new era of autonomy, powered by Industrial AI.”

 

Accelerating digitalization initiatives to stay ahead 

Pramod Lakhmapure, Director of Area Sales for South East Asia opened the event with a brief welcome before handing it over to Pietri.  In his remarks, Pietri explained that the current challenges brought about by the global pandemic require companies to embrace new levels of operational automation and agility to survive. Looking ahead, enterprises can only expect more volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) where they will be required to maximize value performance and sustain it across multiple dimensions, namely safety, sustainability, availability and productivity.

To achieve these goals, plants will need to become increasingly self-learning, self-adapting and self–sustaining – key characteristics of a Self-Optimizing Plant.

A Self-Optimizing Plant can predict future conditions, both market and operational, provide actionable insights and then act accordingly, furnishing expert recommendations to a human-in-the-loop if necessary and automating execution securely in a closed feedback loop.

 

Maintaining competitive edge in a VUCA environment

 

Following this presentation, the event moved into a Q&A dialogue session. During this segment Pietri had the opportunity to share real-life examples of how AspenTech is helping our customers maintain their competitive edge in a VUCA environment. One example centered on a customer operating in South Asia who was able to harness AspenTech’s PIMS-AO production planning software to overcome plummeting jet fuel demand by agile crude selection and by moving production towards diesel.

 

A drive for sustainable operations

 

There was also significant sharing about the ways AspenTech is helping customers address concerns on meeting current and future sustainability targets. We reaffirmed our promise to help customers achieve greater energy efficiency to reduce emissions with our technology. This is an imperative, as mentioned by Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, “The right efficiency policies could enable the world to achieve more than 40% of the emissions cuts needed to reach its climate goals without new technology.”

 

Accelerating AI adoption

 

In my closing remarks for the event, I explained how companies that accelerated AI adoption tend to outperform their competitors especially in a VUCA environment. That is why AspenTech is embedding Industrial AI – which combines data science, machine learning, AI and cloud computing with the "first principles” of chemistry and physics – in our solutions. We are doing this because our mission is to help our customers build the Self-Optimizing Plants of the future which are safer, greener, more reliable and optimal.

 

To find out more, please read Industrial AI Accelerates Digital Transformation for Capital-Intensive Industries.