How Thermax is transforming through automation

[devikad]

How Thermax is transforming through automation


It is indeed the digital era. Every business and company is today looking to digitize its process. The main objective behind this transformation is to make the business operations easy, paperless and save costs in the long term. With similar objectives, an energy solutions company, Thermax, established a 5 year long term plan.

In conversation with ETCIO, Prosenjit Sengupta, Chief Digital Officer, Thermax, shares this roadmap and the 3 major pillars for this transformation.

"We understood that digitalisation is going to be one of the key growth levers for the organisation. We did internal benchmarking workshops and got external help from consultants. After hours of discussion we derived our digital roadmap spanning over 5 years. Meaning a long-term roadmap of how we were going to move ahead step-by-step," said Prosenjit Sengupta, Chief Digital Officer, Thermax.

Thermax broke the entire digitisation initiative into 3 basic categories which are Employee Automation, Business Automation and Customer Engagement. Between all three, the company wanted to automate the processes and digitalise the entire look and feel of Thermax in a holistic manner.

Employee Automation

Sengupta believes that the employees advocate the use of digital technologies to their customers only when themselves are digitally enabled and are also being benefited by them. According to him, the employees need to believe in digitalisation and be conversant with the digitalisation technologies to convince the customers to use them.

Hence, one pillar of the digital roadmap of the company is employee automation. The company has completely automated its human capital management. And has introduced new systems which helps in managing all the facets of the employees life cycle. It includes attendance, HR, Payroll, time management, performance appraisals, recruitment, onboarding and learning management system.

One of the recently transformed business processes is the automation of claim settlement. Where people used to visit the central offices earlier to file for claims which did not only took time but was also a paper heavy process has now been transformed digitally. The employees have been enabled with a mobile application which makes the process quicker and easier.

"The application is assisted by some AI and ML algorithms which further make it easier for the employees to file their claims. Usually, the employees are supposed to feed in the vendor name, city, amount and a few other things. But, at Thermax, people just click the photograph of the bills through their camera. The intelligent algorithms read these bills and feed in the data themselves," he explained.

Because many manual and paper-based processes are being eliminated, it is helping the company go green, adherence to policy becomes better and processes for finance become easier.

Business Automation

"Sri City factory of Thermax is the first milestone in terms of factory automation and factory digitalisation. Initially, this factory was getting developed as a state-of-the-art in Sri city but we also thought of creating it as a 'Digital state of the art'. We implemented MES right from day 1 in this factory. It is one of the factories in the capital goods area of its kind with this high level of automation," he said.

Sengupta believes that the digital processes of factories have helped the company stay true to timelines and can govern them in an efficient manner. He said, with this, quality can be checked upon, and various other operational parameters of the factory can be governed.

Further, Themrax is on its way to implement PLM systems. It will help in the automation of product areas which includes the product portfolio, parts catalogue, and design structure.

"We have a very tight integration with lagging systems like ERPs and CRMs. So it also helps in schedule adherence and quality adherence and improvements. Implementations and improvements with the digital technologies have continuously been happening on the ERP. So it is no longer the one we had implemented 10 years ago but is more aligned and integrated with all the new age technologies," he explained.

Customer Engagement

"This process started right from the customer, his interactions, enquiries, proposals, project management, manufacturing, the entire gamut of services and the value chain of operations," Sengupta said.

Thermax has embarked on the step-by-step approach of automating each of those three areas.

For the customer engagement part of the digital roadmap, the company has majorly embedded technologies in the product itself to help their customers get a better sense of them. Apart from these, digital marketing campaigns connected with the enquiry management systems, CRM system, all have helped the business engage with the customers.

Source: https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/strategy-and-management/how-thermax-is-transforming-through-automation/78800619

[Abdelziz]

It's a good article, thanks for sharing!

[Kristeertam]

It's fascinating to see how Thermax is embracing automation to transform their business operations. By digitizing their processes, they're aiming to make operations more efficient, cost-effective, and eco-friendly. I'm particularly impressed with their focus on employee automation, recognizing the importance of empowering their workforce with digital tools and technologies. Implementing a work management system can truly streamline various aspects of employee lifecycle management, from attendance and HR to payroll and performance appraisals. It's great to hear that Thermax has also automated claim settlement, leveraging AI and ML algorithms to simplify the process.