Exclusive Interview: Dev Ramchandani, Sr. Director, Hitachi Vantara

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Dev Ramchandani, Sr. Director, Smart Manufacturing, Hitachi Vantara talks about Hitachi Vantara's Lumada product Portfolio and development targeted to achieve the manufacturing industry in India.

What are the recent developments within Hitachi Vantara? How has been your time in a business perspective during this COVID pandemic? What are the recent developments, new initiatives? How was the business during the pandemic times?

In the digital solutions business unit within Hitachi Vantara, we have been focusing a lot on consulting-led industrial digital solutions. We refer to it as industry 4.0 or Smart manufacturing, manufacturing 4.0 or intelligent manufacturing.

During the pandemic, huge cloud migration has taken place. Still, many enterprises have not adopted data storage or cloud ecosystem. Why is it important to break this stereotype and adopt a much more efficient software and data management system?

In terms of cloud migration, companies need more stability. If companies are replacing a paper-based system or any traditional system with a digital solution, they need to perform 100%. 99% is just not good enough because from a compliance perspective, if they have to store data. It's not good enough if the system is even down for two minutes and any production is happening. From that perspective, 100% uptime reliability of the system is very important and that is something that is a key advantage of cloud migration.

Describe Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada portfolio, what development is being targeted to achieve for the manufacturing industry in India?

Lumada is not just one platform. We are trying to work on for manufacturers are multiple suites of offerings of Lumada. One is Lumada manufacturing insights which is effectively is focused across all the core areas. Core area refers to production quality, maintenance, and supply chain safety. Across all these dimensions, we are focusing on Lumada manufacturing insights to help manufacturers move in their journey of intelligent manufacturing maturity.

We also have a suite of solutions called Lumada SSVI which is more around the smart spaces and video intelligence. That's also a very interesting offering. The power of video insights or image analytics is still used very limitedly in manufacturing and this is offering a lot of potentials for us to do that. Simple aspects such as looking at compliance, looking at flow, is something that can be very easily feasible with that.

Which sector do you see the maximum shift is going in in terms of digital transformation?

We are seeing good traction which we are getting from the metal and mining clients. That is one area that is picking up. We are also seeing a good pull from the manufacturers of the industrial product, for example, transformer manufacturers or people who are into the heavy goods type stuff and also some of the automotive OEM's-they are also picking up quite well and even the tier one Tier 2 suppliers there.

What component of Lumada will benefit most of the manufacturing sector?

We have Lumada manufacturing insights dedicated to manufacturing. Along with that, in terms of the support infra, we have the Lumada edge intelligence and SSVI which will also kind of join hands along with this, but manufacturing insights will be the outer layer. That's something that the end-users will see and use more.

Automation is now playing an important role in manufacturing especially. What are some challenges that manufacturing enterprises face and how is Hitachi Vantara helping in eliminating those challenges?

One of the challenges around automation which has always persisted is the business case. It's very difficult for us to formulate a tangible ROI and a business case when we are going for automation because manpower is available cheap. And you have very high variability in terms of the incoming raw material, which does not make it amenable for automation. When we are going for automation, the input also has to be standardized to a certain extent. So from that perspective, if we look at these challenges, how we are pitching in this is we are focused in terms of working with manufacturers, to help look at the broader picture. think of a digital transformation road map and basis that, decide what is it that makes sense for me because I cannot just be a micro-focused entity, I have to look at being future-ready as an organization, and when I think of being future-ready as an organization, suddenly the lens with which I look at particular investment changes. And the way I do the ROI calculation also changes. So, we are helping them in terms of formulating this whole digital transformation road map, putting together the business case, ROI justifications and also helping them on the specific solution use cases.

In the manufacturing industry, accurate insights have now been given importance. What kind of change was noticed since 2020 that gave more significance to data and insights for this sector?

There's a lot of time that is invested in just data gathering in this sector, unfortunately, maybe a lot of the systems are not performing as adequate or some part of the data which is relevant is not captured. So there was a significant effort was going on in terms of data gathering and it was people-intensive as well in some of the cases. Now what is happening is in terms of the increased competition, the changes in the supply chain, some of these elements are no longer being left to chance and people want to go more systemic and ensure that instead of somebody noting down the numbers, I am getting data directly from the system so that I have a single version of the truth. Once I have the single version of truth or the connected factory/connected operations as we call it, you have the base which will help you improve further. And unless I have that base, I can't move to predictive prescriptive, which is becoming the norm of the day. There are a lot of competitors who are coming into the market, there is customer expectation which is changing altogether.

How is the second wave of COVID-19 different from the first wave from a business perspective?

When the first wave started, manufacturers realized to operate considering all these challenges in mind. However, having said that, when wave two has come, it has further reinforced the aspect in terms of the importance of supply chain responsiveness, improved planning and analysis, production speed, flexibility, employee protection and also thinking of these in a more systemic manner. Because what happened earlier was these are some protocols which we need to follow, but now, the mood is shifting more into the aspect of how do we make it a way of life? Because it's not that I have to do this only for a certain period. This is something which could come in and there are other disruptions which would keep coming in. So how do I gear up and how do I create a resilient system which will be capable to handle these disruptions in terms of initially resisting them, and then if we have to go through something, then recovering at a faster pace. Both the resistance and recovery dimensions, both are coming into the picture here.

 What is the road map for the next 12 to 18 months for Hitachi Vantara?

It will continue to be focused on consulting driven industrial digital solutions at a high level. We would want to continue to go deeper into the Lumada manufacturing insights. In this initially, functionally, we pick quality, maintenance, production, supply chain, safety and in each of these we are thinking about use cases not just for the basic visualization integration, but also from a prediction and a prescription perspective, and then moving on to symbiotic as well. We will ingrain all best practices along with digital to establish the next wave. This is one of the key focus areas as we look at the next 12 to 18 months.

Read more from Ankit Parashar here

Read products news here