GAIL organises Industry Meet on Digital Transformation to share knowledge and experience of peer oil and gas organizations in digitalization

by Suman Gupta

New Delhi, January , 2020: In order to share knowledge and experience about cutting edge digital technologies among India’s oil and gas companies, GAIL (India) Limited today organised an Industry Meet on Digital Transformation here.

Inaugurating the Industry Meet, GAIL Chairman & Managing Director Dr Ashutosh Karnatak said “Digital Yatra 2.0 is launched. Gone are the days to walk and run, not even the time to sprint. But we have to fly. Let’s all get on-board on this digital journey. So, think digital and be digital.”

The Industry Meet was organised with an aim to enrich participants with knowledge and experience of peer organizations in the digitalization journey. This was a signification step towards building greater synergy in leveraging emerging digital technologies such as Machine Learning, Advanced Analytics, Cloud, IIoT and Digital Twins for the mutual benefit of individual organizations as well as industry.

Dr Karnatak said, “the digital journey needs to be inclusive where we have to take the entire organization together. The next milestone in our digital journey is to work together as an industry. This is the time when we have to work together and learn from each other and grow in our digital journey.”

Shri A K Tiwari, Director (Finance), GAIL said that 2020s will be the age of digitalization. He said monetary ROI could not be the only metric to take up the digital transformation projects. The strategic and operational impact, sustainability goals, along with the promise of improving work-life balance should also be the criteria to take up the digital initiatives. He also emphasized on the need of strong cybersecurity to reap the true value of digitalization.

On the occasion, Shri A K Tiwari was conferred with Digital Ratna Award by Dr Karnatak.

A panel discussion was held having participants from Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum, Engineers India Limited and GAIL which was moderated by industry expert from EY.  The participants talked about role of digital in successful implementation of projects like Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, supply chain tracking, consumer analytics, customer care systems. The uses of new technologies like Digital Twins in plants and pipelines and Prescriptive Analytics based on Artificial Intelligence for efficiency improvement and cost reduction were discussed. The role of strong cybersecurity and full-time CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) were emphasized for successful digital transformation.

Shri S V Prasad, Executive Director (O&M-CO) emphasized building a common ground among the organization to work collaboratively towards harnessing the vast value proposition that digitalization offers to the business.

Industry experts from Microsoft, SAS and Siemens also addressed participants on the occasion.