State-of-the-art technologies allow for scale and reliability: Honeywell

Honeywell is a Fortune 100 technology company that delivers industry-specific solutions. These include aerospace products and services, control technologies for buildings and industry, and performance materials, globally. The technologies help aircraft, buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable.

Here, Karthik Ganapathi, Vice President and Managing Director, Honeywell Connected Enterprise, India, tells us more about the future of work. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are you facilitating digital work?

Karthik Ganapathi: As a global pandemic spreads around the world, every industry is looking for ways to change how they work. This includes refineries, chemical plants and manufacturing facilities. Honeywell has deployed new software solutions that enable process operations to be monitored or even executed from remote locations outside of the plant facilities.

These remote options use the power of Honeywell Forge offerings to proactively detect issues and bring them to the attention of both the customer and Honeywell experts whether through intelligent wearables, video assistance training or access to on-call experts. Honeywell Forge is built on cloud technology with industry standard security and data features.

Honeywell is offering its diverse set of customers, from the Oil & Gas, Refining, Petrochemicals, Chemicals, Pharma, Pulp, Paper, Power and Mining & Metals industries, solutions and a suite of other Honeywell Forge offerings to ensure complete visibility of the essential manufacturing processes, work continuity, remote testing and remote delivery of critical services.

Our solutions also enable remote operations from anywhere, patch/anti-virus updates and system security monitoring. In addition, we have an ‘Expert on Call’ solution which provides on demand remote collaboration over audio / video call through hands free wearable devices.

Honeywell is using the power of Honeywell Forge to help building operators remotely monitor buildings and offer improved operations and occupant experiences. Honeywell recently launched the Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization - its cloud-based, closed-loop, machine learning solution that continuously studies a building’s energy consumption patterns and automatically adjusts to optimal energy saving settings. We are headed to a ‘new normal’ in the post COVID world. Honeywell is ready to serve its diverse set of customers with its state-of-the-art mobility and software solutions.

DQ: What are the solutions provided by Honeywell for improved productivity?

Karthik Ganapathi: Every digital product offer that Honeywell brings to the market has a strong productivity improvement characteristic. This may come in the form of asset productivity, process improvement, or worker productivity. Honeywell Forge drives significant productivity improvements for our customers and brings an end-to-end view on productivity by incorporating AI/ML to create continuous learning systems and with the capability to provide close-looping of recommendations via mobility solutions.

First is the transformational impact on productivity via AI/ML to solve day-to-day operational problems. Industrial companies traditionally used rules-based decision logic in both manual and software driven decision making. Rapid advances in AI/ML and compute power are now enabling creation of learning models (algorithms that evolve/adapt based on new information) that help operators make better and more accurate decisions.

The AI/ML-based analytics solutions enable aggregating data, analyzing/modeling the data, and training the data to mimic real-world observed behaviors and support meaningful outcomes. For industrial solutions, it starts with a ‘historian’ that aggregates time-series and event data. This data is fed into our analytics engine, which models the information using proprietary algorithms developed over several years combining data science and field operator expertise.

The insights are presented to the end-user, who takes specific actions and records those actions. The application has the ability to ‘learn’ based on these actions (model vs. human) utilizing our proprietary AI/ML technology. Over-time, these actions will converge, improving the ability to provide accurate and rapid decision making at the operator level. Honeywell continues to find innovative ways to bridge the domain knowledge that exists within most organizations with learning AI/ML models in its Honeywell Forge solutions.

Second is the close-looping via mobility solutions. Industrial companies, with a majority of desk-less workforce, are already set-up to embrace mobility solutions. There are usually Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for each operator / technician to do a particular job.

DQ: How does the Honeywell solutions help?

Karthik Ganapathi: Each job requires understanding the information (alarms, events), conducting a series of checks on an equipment or process, performing adjustments/change settings/replace parts, talking to experts, getting supervisor approvals, and closing the job. Some of these activities require on-site presence and some can be executed remotely. In the past, all of this workflow would have required the technician(s), supervisor, and expert (to physically inspect) to be on-site.

This entire “paper” workflow is now digitized, using secure digital worker assist solutions, which run on the worker’s mobile device and also provides standing instructions for the job, interprets asset/process data, links to experts with through various chat capabilities, incorporates augmented reality features, and has digital logbook capabilities. With this, we only need the person doing the job on-site, while others work remotely. This automatically creates better tracking/tracing of the job performed and running detailed analytics to drive productivity improvements.

There are two key enablers that ensure the above is sustainable: One is security. The second is cloud infrastructure. Honeywell Forge is built on cloud technologies with the highest industry standard security and data features.

As we see this digital shift towards mobility and analytics, companies need to start embracing state-of-the-art technologies that allow for scale and reliability. The volume of data generated in any organization doubles every 3-6 months. Analytics systems need to be able to tap into this wealth of information to ‘learn’ and become more effective.

Cloud infrastructure enables the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and offers the ability to rapidly scale in a secure manner. Cloud applications allow for secure remote access and enables the mobility and analytics solutions. These applications need to be available ‘all the time’ and cloud deployment ensures necessary availability and support. The market has spoken as well - Cloud has become ubiquitous in the past couple of years.

Karthik Ganapathi, Vice President and Managing Director, Honeywell Connected Enterprise India

Honeywell solutions are deployed with state-of-the-art cybersecurity features and support customers’ unique productivity and performance improvement needs with scalable, reliable and high performing offers.