(130a) Leveraging Digital and Factory Automation with Help of a Centrally Located Integrated Plant Operation Centre Outside Plant Premises.

Background: In line with Factories of Future, leveraging digital and factory automation, it is imperative to establish a near site unified command and control operation for Sintering & Raw material bedding and blending plant. With an emphasis on synergy, agile working, cross learning, faster and effective decision making and better coordination amongst all control stations, all six (06) control rooms is shifted to a centrally located integrated Plant Operation Centre.This transformation will be instrumental in future autonomous operation of Plant.

Uniqueness: Delinking Talent from Assets Due to the nature of the Iron Making value chain, factories are typically in remote locations, where the best of talent might be scarce and operational hazards are many. By separating the operations control from shopfloor processes, Tata Steel has laid the groundwork to ensure that geographical boundaries do not limit availability of talent, process, safety, environment and work can move anywhere than vice versa. With talent delinked from asset location, expertise is transferred remotely, ensuring rapid and efficient deployment of best practices even when new plants are set up. Operations, Safety and environment have also become safer with lesser people deployed near hazardous zones ✓ Technological enablement ✓ Real time data feed (voice, video & data overlay in unified layer) ✓ Fault Tolerant Architecture through distributed computing ✓ Edge Cluster and Cloud leveraged, digital twin and analytics enabled

Business Connect : It helped in overcoming from following shortcoming of traditional plant control (through separate control rooms):

a. Limited visibility to incoming raw material. The visibility is provided through periodic lab reports provided by scientific services. Real-time pile quality is not visible in Pellet Plant, SP1, SP2 control rooms.

b. Communication gaps regarding breakdown among different units (Pellet Plant, Sinter Plants & RMBB, and among the different units of Sinter plants & Material Despatch Control Room) leading to delayed action, thus productivity loss.

c. Decentralized operation planning among agglomerate plants leading to siloed decision-making.

d. Enhancing knowledge transfer and developing a multi-skilled pool of shared human resources among agglomerates plant.

e. Enhancing safety of field operators by digitally enabling the control rooms through CCTV footage in critical areas and reducing man-machine interactions.

Impact: Reduced number of incidents in dept Savings of 35cr per year Agile decision making, faster deployment Synergy and cross learning Benchmarking with all Sinter plants across India Achieved Best ever productivity & Stack emission. Reduction in Solid fuel rate by 5kg/tns over FY’22