SABIC leverages the power of digital transformation

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought about a series of changes in all domains of life. The corporate world is no different. There is no time to pause and ponder. You either embrace what digital transformation has to offer or be disrupted by others.

At SABIC, we were quick to recognize the enormous potential of digitalization and the power of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

We launched the Corporate Digitalization Program in 2019 to leverage advances in digital technologies, improve competitiveness and strengthen our leadership in the chemical industry by capitalizing on artificial intelligence and machine learning, becoming a more data-driven and proactive company.

By the end of 2019, SABIC’s digital strategy was formulated. It has multiple digital initiatives across all business domains and corporate functions. In 2020, 21 initiatives were started across our organization, including manufacturing, procurement, business sales, sustainability and technology and innovation.

The implementation of digitalization focuses on business change and innovation with cutting-edge technologies and data insights that create business value for us.

Manufacturing sits at the heart of our digital transformation journey with multiple initiatives. One of them is Asset Health Care where AI is used to promptly predict potential equipment failures. The goal of this initiative is to improve asset reliability and reduce unplanned outages by complementing existing manufacturing excellence systems. Critical equipment in the plant has sensors capturing live critical data like pressure and temperature, which is sent to the SABIC Big Data platform along with historical data.

Experts from our manufacturing sites interpret and analyze the business data and work hand-in-hand with digitalization experts to train the algorithm. Once the algorithm is trained on historical data and gets access to live data, the algorithm can predict future equipment failures with high accuracy.

Our digital future certainly looks promising — with multiple digitalization pilots underway across diverse areas of the business. One example of how our petrochemicals business is leveraging AI is using it to gain deeper insights into price and demand forecasting. Similarly, digitalization is transforming how we approach Procurement. It helps improve our forecasting accuracy about raw material expenditure, among other benefits.

Environment, Health, Safety and Security is another area integral to our culture where digitalization can take our performance to new heights. Technology, especially data and the accessibility of analytics and visualization tools, will make us even more proactive by delivering deep insights that not only mitigate potential EHSS risks, but raise the bar. This is vital, considering that EHSS is emerging as a competitive differentiator to our customers, regulators and investors.

Digital transformation will augment the capabilities of our most valuable asset, SABIC employees. It will change the way employees do their work, freeing up their time to focus on high-value work, which will be more rewarding and satisfying.

These are exciting times. The future is promising. The Corporate Digitalization Program has essentially mapped our journey for the future as we continue to scale up and expand our successful digitalization pilots — while launching new ones.

• Murhaf Almadani is the VP, Corporate Digitalization Program, at SABIC.