Industry 4.0 Saras’ General Manager: “Digitization is a tremendous opportunity for the refining sector”
Cagliari, 24 January – “The best investment we can make is in our personnel and their know-how. Digitization is just one of the opportunities to continue being a successful, top-notch company and it will have significant impact also on a traditional sector such as refining”. With these words, the General Manager of Saras S.p.A., Dario Scaffardi, announced the start-up of the programme #DigitalSaras, at the meeting “Impresa 4.0” organized on 24 January last in Cagliari by Confindustria Digitale. Owner of the largest refinery in the Mediterranean, at Sarroch (Cagliari), the Saras Group has inserted a series of digitization projects into its business plan. The new projects will supplement other software systems already tested and deployed, and will exploit the opportunities offered by cloud, big data and data analysis, industrial internet, cyber security and augmented reality. Something really fundamental – Scaffardi went on – is the change in work quality. “Digitization offers a tremendous opportunity. We at Saras want to exploit it to remain young and to be among the best operators in the sector”.
IN THE FIELD: TABLETS AND 3D VIEWS OF PLANTS Saras and its subsidiary Sarlux, owner of the Sarroch plant, have identified 80 possible applications and ranked them in order of priority; a dedicated team is already working on the first 8 pilot projects. Solutions which will impact on the professional life of technicians, engineers and operatives throughout the industrial area of Southern Sardinia. But digitization projects had already taken off at the start of 2016. One example is the project for 3D reproduction of all site facilities, a painstaking job still in progress. We are also testing the use of tablets and apps by inspectors to verify the plants’ maintenance status. Each year they check more than 2 million observation points on the over 30,000 pieces of equipment present at the site and with these mobile devices they will have on hand the information which today is locked in weighty paper manuals and excel spreadsheets. But when talking of industry, the true revolution is perhaps represented by the possibility of “foreseeing” certain negative events, and thus contain costs: thanks to algorithms that process great volumes of data, it will be possible to identify potential plant break-downs or the dirtying of key nodes. Being able to foresee these events means avoiding unexpected maintenance and hence unplanned shut-downs, with clear cost savings.
MORE EMPATHY, MORE BUSINESS: ROLE GAME As pointed out by the General Manager, #DigitalSaras means above all an improvement in workers’ skills. A number of applications have been designed for Saras personnel. For example, starting from mid-2016 staff of the oil group can take part in a sort of role game, on tablets connected online. The programme consists in a simulator which replicates the Saras value chain: from the purchase of crude to sale of finished products on world markets, passing through set-up of refining plant, with variables linked to ever-changing, complex scenarios. While plant operation and product handling are virtual, the dynamics are absolutely true to life. With one key difference – players are assigned a different role from their actual job position, and thus learn to cover the role of their colleagues, understand how they work, develop empathy towards them. A very sophisticated app, fine-tuned in collaboration with the consulting giant Bcg, which, thanks to the capacity of communication between “players”, reaches truly unexpected levels: often close-knit teams obtain better results than those predicted by the computer.