Air Liquide continues its digital transformation with the opening of a new remote operation centre in Southeast Asia which will act as its Smart Innovative Operations (SIO) Centre in the Asia Pacific region.
The SIO Centre enables remote management of production for 18 Air Liquide Large Industries production units, spanning over eight countries across the region. The centre is also able to optimise energy consumption and improving reliability at these sites, accounting for the €20 million of Air Liquide’s investment.
Located in Kuala Lumpur, the SIO Centre is capable of achieving all this by leveraging predictive analytics and digital technologies, allowing the company to change way of engaging with the customer to provide better and faster response to their needs across the region.
By combining big data with human intelligence, the workflow of each Air Liquide production unit that is linked to the SIO Centre is adapted in real time to the needs of each customer.
According to François Abrial, member of the Air Liquide Group’s Executive Committee supervising Asia Pacific, the secret sauce to achieving this is to be obsessed with adoption and that it is inevitable for business and IT to collaborate with each other in order to succeed.
In the connected plants, new digital technologies are being deployed to simplify maintenance and inspection management operations. For instance, connected glasses allow operators to interface with experts located elsewhere while virtual reality-based training assist them in their daily tasks.
Abrial continues by saying: “With this new centre, the Group is continuing its digital transformation, so that we can better anticipate industrial customers’ needs while strengthening the reliability of its production units. We are glad to implement the new Smart Innovative Operations (SIO) Centre in Malaysia, a highly promising market with both a solid IT infrastructure and high-skilled professionals in big data analysis.”
Datuk Zainal Amanshah, CEO InvestKL, said: “We are proud to the be part of Air Liquide’s journey, which joins the long list of multinationals that have called Greater Kuala Lumpur their Regional hub. This SIO Centre illustrates the ability of our Malaysian talent to be at the forefront of Industry 4.0 and Digitalization. This is also a strong endorsement to the Malaysian ecosystem, and a testament that our talent are of high-quality and of global standards.”
