Birla Opus Paints: Integrating Six Manufacturing Plants With Industry 4.0

Birla Opus Paints, housed under Grasim Industries, Aditya Birla Group’s flagship firm, offers decorative painting solutions. Launched in 2024, the decorative paints company invested Rs 9,727 Cr. to set up six integrated manufacturing plants with a paints portfolio featuring products across categories like interiors, exteriors, waterproofing, enamel paints, wood finishes and wallpapers.

The company operates 5 manufacturing facilities— Panipat (Haryana), Ludhiana (Punjab), Cheyyar (Tamil Nadu), Chamarajanagar (Karnataka), and Mahad (Maharashtra). Its sixth facility, in Kharagpur (West Bengal), is expected to commence production over the course of FY25. 

All 6 manufacturing plants are equipped with 4th generation manufacturing technology to manage supply chain processes and end-to-end traceability. In a freewheeling interaction with FE CIO, Girish Rao, Head of IT, Birla Opus Paints, interacts about the experience of setting up the IT infrastructure of the six greenfield and integrated manufacturing plants in India.

The six manufacturing plants of Birla Opus Paints are strategically located, integrated, and operate with a high level of automation. Could you elaborate on what 'integrated' means in this context, and which Industry 4.0 technologies have been implemented?

There are two primary perspectives for integration. First, there's local integration, meaning the integration of processes within a single plant. Second, there's integration across all our plants to provide a central overview.

When we refer to an integrated, Industry 4.0 compliant plant, we mean that all internal processes can be monitored, measured, and are visible from a single point within the plant. Critically, all activities can be controlled through one central console. That defines the integration of processes within a single plant.

The second layer of integration addresses the six plants collectively. If you want to see what's happening across all six, there's a central view providing a process overview.

The third aspect of integration is through our application layer, specifically SAP. This system, hosted on the cloud, handles all material accounting and warehouse management, standardizing these functions across all plants. So, to summarize, we have three layers of integration: process level within each plant, process overview across all plants, and an application layer (SAP) that controls processes across all the six plants.

How have you handled the Information Technology (IT) / Operational Technology (OT) integration?

IT/OT integration operates from two perspectives. One is the application perspective, where systems like SAP exist. The OT layer and the application layer communicate to generate the various documents required for material movement within the plant. 

The other perspective is the visibility of processes, which is enabled by IT/OT integration. All our Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs are the brains of industrial machines) and SCADA devices are managed through the OT network, and this is integrated into our IT applications, such as the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and then SCP, which handles all material accounting. 

Essentially, OT manages the integration of physical activities like conveyors, boilers, and reactors, providing real-time data on their capacity utilization and activities at specific areas within the plant. All this information is viewable at one central location using the MES application through the OT network.

When you say Industry 4.0 technology, how do you define it? What technologies or capabilities are currently live across all your integrated plants?

Industry 4.0 compliance has been foundational from day one, impacting everything from civil engineering to mechanical systems and operations. It's not just a single aspect; when building a plant, it must be thought through from all perspectives.

To be specific, all our mechanical processes are Industry 4.0 compliant. This means every activity, from material inwards, processing across the plant (both raw and packing material), storage, consumption tracking, and finished goods storage right up to dispatch, is controlled through various sensors, SCADA, and PLC devices. These devices continuously feed real-time information about material status. This data then culminates in our MES (Manufacturing Execution System), which in turn creates data in SAP to account for production and material movement. So, the entire process is thoroughly integrated and IT/OT enabled.

What is the IT backbone or digital infrastructure you've built to ensure the reliability and availability of these systems?

Considering we don't have a data center, we are entirely cloud-based; 99% of our applications reside on the cloud. Because of this, we invested heavily in on-plant connectivity infrastructure. We have three levels of backup—primary, secondary, and a third—which ensures 99.99% uptime and visibility for all our cloud-based servers essential for plant operations. As this was a greenfield plant, we opted not to invest in traditional on-premise servers. 

Traditionally, SAP and other servers would be housed within the plants to minimize production loss due to server unavailability, as infrastructure used to be a major challenge. By implementing three levels of backup, we've ensured near 100% availability of our servers at the plant. We hold no application-related data or servers physically at the plant; all such information is centrally located on the cloud. 

The servers present at the plant are solely for OT and OT-related devices. This greenfield approach gave us a significant advantage.

As far as artificial intelligence is concerned, is it inherent in the platforms and infrastructure you've built, regardless of the level?

Multiple levels of AI can be enabled. Currently, we don't have sufficient historical data, so we haven't enabled advanced AI aspects. For instance, preventive or predictive maintenance requires extensive historical information to accurately predict failures and proactively manage downtime. However, the applications we've implemented, our firewalls, and our MES applications all have AI capabilities built into them.

To give an example, the firewall we use between IT and OT is AI-enabled. It can recognize intrusions based on AI algorithms that analyze patterns and whitelist/blacklist devices. Beyond that, it can detect unusual intrusions and alerts our Network Operations Center (NOC).

AI agents are part of the base system itself. We don't specifically call them ‘AI agents,’ but agents are already running on top of SCADA and PLCs. They collect and aggregate information, making it available to manufacturing plants locally for their specific KPIs, and centrally for core KPIs. These agents are already in place as part of the software.

And do you use any observability platforms to ensure your systems are always available?

We use Cisco and ThousandEyes platforms to monitor and measure our uptimes, detect any connectivity issues, or variances from standard baselines. Additionally, our MES system captures information, stores it in a historical application and database, and then uses that data to provide local visibility into plant operations.

What benefits have you already realized or expect to realize in the second half of this year or next, as you continue your IT investments ?

The primary objective of automation and leveraging the latest technologies has led to clear benefits. While I wouldn't say we've fully quantified every benefit yet, we clearly observe enhanced consistency, visibility, and optimization of processes both within and across our plants. This level of achievement would only be possible because of our latest IT, OT, and MES systems, coupled with SAP.

Our competitors, often running legacy systems, face challenges either with visibility or with the sheer amount of resources or manpower required to achieve similar production levels. So, while we haven't put a precise number on it right now, the benefit is distinctly visible.

One major aspect of manufacturing excellence is Total Equipment Effectiveness (TEE) and wastage reduction. Can you discuss these ?

The amount of real-time visibility across different processes—from the inward movement of raw and packing materials, their storage methods and conditions, to goods issued for production ensures less wastage.

Secondly, since the entire process is available in real-time, we can optimize costs and processes more effectively, embracing a ‘just-in-time’ philosophy. The visibility itself generates a lot of information that helps reduce wastage in storage or fallouts for raw and packing materials. Also, when storing finished goods, the variability and precision of our dispatch planning ensure we produce what is required and can deliver what is needed to the market. To that extent, we haven't yet faced situations where we overproduced items not needed in the market.

What were some of the challenges you faced while rolling out these systems across all six plants? Each location is different, with varying connectivity and IT infrastructure depending on the state, and also public infrastructure.

The most critical challenge was connectivity – securing the right connectivity and uptime commitments at each of these locations, as none are situated near urban infrastructure. 

Secondly, the upfront investment in these technologies without a complete, immediate justification required a significant leap of faith, believing it would deliver long-term savings and a quicker payback. These were the two major challenges.

Thirdly, our commitment to a cloud-first journey put a lot of onus on us to think about integration from day one. This ensured all information was aggregated in one place, allowing us to leverage future technologies quickly, rather than waiting for data to centralize before running decision-making or AI tools. Keeping it AI-ready was one of our critical factors. 

One important point you shared, which every CIO faces, is the full-fledged justification of upfront CAPEX. Can you discuss the kind of discussions held and what was that one critical convincing point you presented to management to go for this high upfront CAPEX, expecting long-term benefits?

Convincing management not to have local servers at each plant was perhaps the biggest hurdle, or ‘mind block’ we had to overcome. Most of the project team members had never worked in an environment where such infrastructure wasn't locally present. So, it was difficult to convince end-users, plant management, central teams, and critical stakeholders that this approach could work even without local servers. 

This was the biggest challenge. As we were looking at everything cloud-based, which hadn't been done before by any other company [in this context], it placed a lot of responsibility on the IT department and required a significant leap of faith from the project team to tackle this aspect and deliver on it. The biggest aspect we had to address was the mindset that our plant operations can still run, even if everything is on the cloud.

How was the vendor engagement? This is unique in your industry, given the extensive integration. Inter-vendor engagement was also crucial since no single vendor could operate in isolation. 

There are different vendors at different levels, and getting them to work together and deliver on the project was a key challenge. The only way we could achieve this was through active collaboration and rigorous project management. This might sound cliché, but we practically had daily reviews and a master review every week to ensure nothing fell through the cracks between different system integrators and the teams executing work on the ground.

These two aspects—tight project management and review—were crucial. The choice of partners also played a key role. We avoided partners unwilling to collaborate or those too rigid about the technology they preferred to implement. Most of our system integrators and chosen partners were willing to work across different technologies and products, and were also flexible with things not being perfectly clear initially, demonstrating a willingness to work with everyone. We work with at least 15 to 20 vendors including system integrators.

What are the future plans for achieving further manufacturing excellence on the plant side ?

I think we have largely stabilized. The next challenge is how to leverage the information and data coming in from various OT devices and IT applications for effective decision-making. The second aspect is operational excellence: how do we leverage this information to refine and redefine our processes.

So, our next focus will be on operational excellence, which means defining and refining processes that utilize data to the hilt. The second part is decision-making through all this available information. That's where all the Business Intelligence (BI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will truly come into play.