Disruptive Technologies – A 2021 Update
the company’s website. Examples of information that the system can provide include where lubricants are available for purchase, range of available pack sizes and general information regarding the technical properties of specific products. The company has also reportedly integrated a virtual assistant called Amelia into its business model to respond to inquiries more efficiently from suppliers regarding invoicing and it believes the future of AI in its industry will see a significant increase in unmanned and automated facilities. Sinopec has a long-term plan to roll out construction of 10 ‘intelligent’ plants as part of an objective to achieve a 20 percent reduction in operation costs. In April 2017, Huawei and Sinopec announced a collaborative effort to design a “smart manufacturing platform.” AI is one of eight core capabilities of the platform which will deliver a centralized method of data management and support
A ComTechAdvisory Report
integration of data across multiple applications used to manage factory operations. AI would serve to establish the rules and models that would inform how data is interpreted and offer opportunities for improvement in factory operations. Kyos also uses ML in areas like renewables and PPAs where it creates simulations for price with volumes of production using ML. It also uses ML techniques to look at historical data and project that forward, finding ML to be a robust method to handle large quantities of historical data efficiently. AI and ML, especially combined with automation, do appear to be attracting a great deal of interest and investment and we do expect to see it deployed with increasing frequency across all areas of a commodity business.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Automated Workflow According to Investopedia, Robotic process automation (RPA) refers to software that can be easily programmed to do basic tasks across applications just as human workers do. The software robot can be taught a workflow with multiple steps and applications. RPA software is designed to reduce the burden of repetitive, simple tasks on employees and is seen as having benefits such as reduced costs and fewer errors. While there has been significant interest in RPA for areas like financial
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settlement, scheduling, risk management and so on, ComTech hasn’t seen much evidence of its use beyond automations of various aspects of workflow via a few select RPA based tools. However, RPA and automated workflows are taking off in many industries and as an example, an Accenture study2 determined that over 43% of consumer-packaged goods (CPG) executives indicate their firms already employ automation to cut costs and promote efficiency.
https://www.accenture.com/t20170926T105943Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-61/Accenture-Strategy-Consumer-Goods-Workforce-POV.pdf
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