BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr.8
By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:
Very important milestones were achieved in all stages of STAR refinery’s commissioning and switching to production at full capacity, Head of the SOCAR Turkey Refinery and Petrochemicals Business Unit and General Manager of Petkim Anar Mammadov told Trend.
“Taking into account the power of technology, Industry 4.0 principles and best industry practices, we have implemented very important projects for digital transformation, and we will continue this way. In this context, with the digital transformation we planned specifically for STAR Refinery, our applications such as 'high quality product', 'speed', 'high efficiency', 'least environmental impact', 'flexible production capability' come under the spotlight.
Now we are talking about a process management in which all business processes are integrated using digital systems. We consider the new generation industry, i.e. the Industry 4.0 as a process management where we put the concepts of "digital factory" and "digital way of thinking" in the center and integrate all our business systems using digital technologies,” he said.
Mammadov pointed out that in addition, the company has implemented many advanced analytical projects aiming to increase the efficiency of its facilities, throughput, energy efficiency and product quality by improving optimization and estimation capabilities with advanced analytical and machine learning applications, and the company is advancing many new projects.
“In this way, our ability to act based on data in the decisions we make, to evaluate millions of options that we cannot evaluate, and to make more accurate and fast decisions or to predict possible results increases, and we achieve end-to-end efficiency. In addition to the projects we carried out in operation, we also achieved efficiency and improvements in the way corporate units in finance, procurement and human resources do business. We see that these improvements reflect more positively on our financial results every year. Thanks to the digitalization projects we have implemented so far, I can say that we will make a financial contribution of approximately $43 million in the coming years,” he added.
“As a matter of fact, the flexibility and speed provided by these steps give us a significant competitive advantage in the market. We have involved digital assistants called Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to reduce our employees' operational burden and enable them to focus more on strategic business. These digital assistants started doing routine, rule-based, high-volume activities on our behalf in various applications.”
Mammadov pointed out that with the pandemic, remote access to operational data came to the fore in line with safe and reliable data collection mechanisms.
“Thus, technical teams can remotely monitor production environments and take necessary actions. Likewise, making sense of this data with correct decision-making mechanisms is important for the continuity of production operations under pandemic conditions. Another important pillar of our digital transformation program that we started before the pandemic was to strengthen decision mechanisms with the support of algorithms by processing data with advanced analytical applications such as machine learning or leave it completely to software.
With these practices, we had the opportunity to back up and improve human-based information and decision-making structures learned over many years. Thus, we laid the foundations of the infrastructures that will support our teams in difficult times such as the pandemic. As a result, thanks to the investments we have made in technology and digitalization processes for a long time, we have been able to meet these changing needs during the pandemic process in an agile manner. Similarly, we will develop this transformation in the upcoming processes,” he concluded.
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