Yokogawa Bluestar to enable convergence

By N. N. Sachitanand

BANGALORE, AUG. 27. What's the business environment today? Global competition, thinning margins and shifting customer needs. To survive in such a marketplace, enterprises need to be lean and mean to keep costs down and fleetfooted and flexible to cater to rapidly changing customer demands and market economics. How can this be achieved? By seamlessly integrating manufacturing operations with business systems.

To enable enterprises in the process industry achieve such convergence, the Tokyo-based Yokogawa Inc, a global leader in process control technology, has come with a unique business offering called enterprise technology solutions (ETS). The mandate for ETS is to integrate the entire enterprise, from field instruments to control systems to enterprise-wide business management systems and e-commerce applications.

In order to build up the capability to deliver ETS, Yokogawa has acquired upstream technologies and built global alliances. For instance, it acquired Marex Technolgoies, which specialised in the integration of manufacturing execution systems with enterprise resource planing (ERP). Yokogaa became a global service partner to SAP, the leader in ERP solutions. It has allied with Shell Global Solutions for marketing and implementing Shell's advanced process control technology. Another partnership with Dell Coropration will develop web-enabled supply chain management solutions.

At the core of ETS technology is a powerful plant information management system, named as Exquantum. Based on Windows NT platform, Exquantum integrates the business domain with the process control domain and is the basis of Manufacturing Execution Systems for optimising operations in process industries. It can provide individual solutions without the need to develop customised software.

In India, Yokogawa's front end is its Bangalore-based joint venture, Yokogawa Blue Star (YBL) in which Yokogawa owns 40 per cent of the equity, Blue Star 29 per cent and the rest is with the public. Founded in 1987, YBL has three divisions: systems, products and services. Of last year's turnover of Rs. 143 crores, about 60 per cent came from systems, 30 per cent from products and 10 per cent from services.

According to Mr. J. P. Singh, YBL's Managing Director, the company has an overall 20 per cent share of the process systems market in India. It has till now installed more than 350 distributed control systems all over the country of which the industry-wise breakup is: chemicals 130, refining and petrochemicals 75, power 50, fertilizer 50 and metallurgical 25. The rest is in sectors such as cement, paper, sugar and water treatment. Among the new sectors which YBL has catered to are semiconductor and optical fibre industries.

YBL has now taken up implementation in India of aspects of ETS, such as terminal automation systems for refineries linked to demand forecast from retail outlets, computerised maintenance management systems, plant information management systems, business integration to SAP/Oracle systems and supply chain management. The first major ETS implementation has taken place in Kochi Refineries.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Business
Previous : Declogging FDI inflows
Next     : LVB targets 30 p.c. growth in business