The Road to Digital Transformation

We are living in digital era. It is no secret that technology has been driving industry-wide disruptions for the past two decades, enabling businesses across sectors to achieve massive scale and growth. But when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, mining and metal industry has a history of long lead times. It is perceived to be slow in implementing new digital technologies, especially when compared with industries like banking or FMCG. Having said that, there are few exceptions within the industry that are pro-active in adopting and leveraging such technologies. Vedanta Resources being one of them, visions to transform into a data-driven organization enabling improved recovery, production optimization, enhanced safety and maximized productivity. Its strategic approach through digitization, digitalization and digital transformation is powering its global ambition in a big way while eyeing the top slot globally in the industry in next 2 to 3 years.

It is evident that without evolution, no business can sustain. The commodities business which comprises of metals and mining, entirely revolves around the margins, right from extracting ore from mines to processing it and converting into a finished metal product. After a certain point of time, business operations, maintenance and logistics cannot be made any more efficient humanly, but through digital it can be achieved. Vedanta aims to reduce operations, production and maintenance costs by 10-15% through digital concepts, ideas, tools and technologies. The company have embarked on digital transformation journeys to counter the potential for disruption from incumbents, adapt quickly to supply chain disruptions, time to market pressures and rapidly changing customer expectations.

At Group level, Vedanta is going ahead with the partnership approach to scale up the digital transformation. It partnered with global consulting firm BCG to layout Project ‘Pratham’ which is built around the vision to make Vedanta a fully digitally driven company with a focus on significantly improving volume and cost and improving ease of doing business. To reduce dependency on conventional communication tools and have access to cloud-based tools and services, group wide use of next generation communication and collaboration tools (such as O-365) is adopted, thereby increasing capability, flexibility, agility and team work, thus creating advance digitally enabled workplace. Another such initiative is Project ‘Disha’ that aims to build a design-thinking led and user-centric group level analytics platform that shows data from various business units and supports analytics to gain visibility to data, information and insights across the group. The platform also has the ability to send notification and alerts by making use of triggers in case of any event or mis-matched forecast, thus making the decision-making more effective, reliable and accurate. Through ‘Vedanta Spark’ – the start-up accelerator program, the company is actively seeking out for cutting edge technical solutions through partnering with innovators, disruptors, and start-up firms who can bring in cutting edge technologies and solutions to complement internal innovation efforts in key focus areas.

For a successful digital transformation, alignment of business units with the group is must. For instance, to power entire business with digital, Vedanta has appointed separate CDOs (Chief Digital Officers) for different metal businesses such as zinc, lead, silver, copper, iron ore, aluminium, power, oil & gas and corporate. These CDOs look after digital projects and activities in the individual business units and interact with the Group CDO to take synergetic decisions.

Hindustan Zinc Limited (HZL) a subsidiary of Vedanta, and India’s largest & world’s second largest zinc-lead miner is at the forefront of adopting best-in-class technologies to gain and solidify its competitive moat in the mining industry. The company has set-up a Digital Collaboration Centre that collates and analyses the entire operating data from the mines, mills, smelters and power plants on a single platform, leading to increased decision-making, backed by predicted outcomes, driven by data analytics. Another such project is ‘Drishti’ where investments are made for high-bandwidth underground wireless network, Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced analytics to monitor, control and operate mines in real time from a central control room.

Digitization has also enabled transportation businesses to increase their efficiency and bolstering their supply chain management. ‘Sarathi’ one of the projects at HZL digitalises and automates the logistics supply chain to achieve secure transportation and faster turnaround time by providing real-time tracking of key inputs and intermediate materials. Last year HZL has even launched ‘Evolve’, India’s first online buying platform for non-ferrous metals that help customers, especially MSMEs, with a hassle-free experience of buying metals online with the convenience of opting for smaller quantities and dynamic pricing.

Vedanta Zinc International (VZI) another subsidiary of Vedanta located at South Africa, puts great emphasis on the concept of ‘Adapt and Thrive’ across all areas of its business. VZI’s Fragmentation project at SA entails real-time rock-size measurements from the mining trucks and conveyors. It allows to make better pro-active decisions to reduce downtime and improve recovery. Meanwhile, the Operational Performance Management (OPM) project entails real-time production monitoring, automated reporting and control loop monitoring. enable all staff with insightful data which forms the basis of improving plant stability, increasing plant performance and reducing costs.

These digital transformations worked for the organizations because their leaders went back to the fundamentals: they focused on changing the mindset of its members as well as the organizational culture and processes before they decide what digital tools to use and how to use them. Vedanta believes in empowering its employees, fostering collaboration, fuel productivity and maximize mobility to attract and retain top talent, while mitigating risks that come with providing freedom and space to employees. It is thus evident: When digitalization is well planned, its value is undeniable.