Smart Plants and Petrochemical Manufacturing in the age of Industry 4.0 need to rely more than ever on Process Data and Key Performance Indicators in the production process to stay ahead of the curve. The digital plant manager is measured, not only on monthly production report, but also by the ability to make informed decisions based on predictive big data analytics. 

Some of the key digital transformation needs are 

• Upgrade existing end-of-life on-premise operational technology systems within process control network to combat risk and security vulnerabilities
• Future-proof against business disruption
• Real-time management of plant assets data and different production processes data
• Real-time data streaming for real-time analytics on cloud
• Scalable, cost-effective, and highly available digital platforms for continuous monitoring of production operations and performance indicators

Digital solutions must address the needs of all its stakeholders - operators, process engineers, maintenance engineers, refinery site management, and the overall enterprise.

Digital transformation with AWS

Wipro Energy domain Consulting team has designed and delivered key transformations on AWS Cloud. Here, we highlight some of Wipro AWS migration and adoption of AWS Native Architectural capabilities related to Oil Downstream Manufacturing Process, Chemical Samples Management, Retail B2B and B2C application and Renewables Energy Digital Decentralized trade platform.

• Real-time data management platform for refinery and petrochemical manufacturing assets data, and enablement of production process data stream onto a big data platform for analytics on AWS

Migration of OSI PI infrastructure to AWS resulted in improved scalability of PI Servers globally and resulted in making available real time key manufacturing process data together with associated contextual asset data to plant supervisory and maintenance staff. It enabled integration with 3rd party big data analytics platform. The AWS migration saw reduction in operating expenses and practically zero capex due to a strategy of hybrid deployment of having centralized single instance deployment of OSI PI Asset Framework, PI Server & Vision components with local site wise deployment of PI Data Collectors on AWS.

• Global Lubricants Laboratory Information Management System deployment on AWS Cloud using native cloud architecture

In this case of LIMS design and deployment on AWS for several global lab sites, we observed benefits in terms of better manageability of aggregated historical lab datasets over a highly available and fault resilient platform, and reduction in TCO.

• Energy Downstream Retail & Lubes portfolio migration to AWS owing to end-of-life and security vulnerability

In this case of migration of retail and lubricants application portfolio for B2B and B2C to AWS, we observed benefits stemming from adoption of AWS Cloud native architectures, TCO reduction, and importantly, the ease of lift and shift migration approach to remediate security vulnerability.

• Internet scalability of digital energy trade platform at optimized cost and high performance through adoption of reactive microservices architecture and serverless Lambda functions

In this case of internet scaling on AWS for alternate energy domain, we observed high performing application architectures using AWS EKS with Fargate, Lambda, SQS and Cloudwatch.

The way forward for chief digital officers

Here, we share some of the key observations and learnings culled from our experience.

• Key digital design decisions are the outcome of several important factors which not only focus on OpEx and CapEx but also deployment architecture standards, ease of integration to 3rd party  big data analytics platforms such as AWS IoT Analytics, reduction of network latency through hosting in AWS regions closest to the customer sites
• Work with domain architects and digital leads for addressing stakeholder apprehensions and speculations
• The centralized PI server on AWS provides the scalability and ability to provide real-time data access and visualization 
• Ideate and come up with the best possible deployment strategies for Lab Information Management System application which are non-standardized to ensure high availability, resiliency, aggregation of lab historical datasets and automation of lab sample collection
• Adoption of new age reactive microservices architecture design helps speed to market of several key services used in Alternate Energy digital platforms
• Fix end of service life risks and security vulnerabilities with AWS cloud migration and rehosting on upgraded VMs

Sandipan Chakraborti

Senior Architect, Wipro Energy

Sandipan Chakraborti is a Senior Architect with Wipro’s Energy vertical. He has over 20 years of experience in consulting and execution of Digital Transformations, Domain Solution Architecture for the Oil & Gas & Mining sector, Government Enterprise Architecture, Fintech, IT Service Management and Technology Programme Management for complex system integration initiatives. 

Contributors - Avinash Gupta, Amit Patil, Ashish Karmakar, Suman Pulluru, Upendra Singh