Menu
Print Edition of the Magazine, Available from JANUARY 2024 onwards, Contact us to subscribe.
During these trying times when the industry is heavily affected with economical issues came up the pandemic called Covid 19 and disrupted the industry completely. We at Industrial Automation Magazine have taken an initiative to bring the industry together and share their viewpoints so that others reading can take measures accordingly to have minimal damage.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in interviews are personal, not necessarily of the organisations represented.
Sunil Khanna completed his B.Tech in Electronics Engineering from IIT (BHU) in 1976 and
M. Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1978. Mr Khanna is currently the
President and Managing Director of Vertiv India (formerly Emerson Network Power India
Ltd.). Prior to this, he was the Managing Director of Emerson Process Management India
Ltd between 2006 and 2011. Prior to joining Emerson, Sunil spent 22 years with ABB in
various countries and rose to the position of Vice President – Automation Technology.
Mr Khanna is a founding member of Automation Industry Association (AIA) and was its
President from 2008 to 2011. He is also a key member of Confederation of Indian Industry
(CII), elected as CII National Council Member between 2008 and 2010. He was nominated
Vice Chairman of the CII Maharashtra State council in 2015, and subsequently as Chairman
in 2016. Until recently Sunil was the Chairman of Skill Development Taskforce for CII
Western Region.
Since 2005 onwards, Mr Khanna has been actively involved in academia-industry interface
initiatives. He also champions rural, social and agricultural development of our country,
particularly in the State of Maharashtra. Under CSR initiative, he has taken up “Restoration
of Assi River” at Varanasi which was completed in March 2019.
Sunil Khanna was conferred with Distinguished Alumnus Award by IITBHU in 2017 and
Centenary Award in Feb 2019.
The world has witnessed many viruses in the recent past like SARS (2002), MERS (2015),
H1N1 (2009), etc. However unlike other past viruses, Covid19 can spread faster. If one
SARS, MERS, H1N1 infected person infects 1~2 persons, a Covid19 infected person can
infect 3~4 persons. Even though the fatality rate is lower than the earlier viruses, due to its
faster spread it can impact a vast population quickly and the resulting number of patients
overwhelm the hospital infrastructure. So countries that had the experience of dealing with
these past viruses were also struggling to contain this one.
Due to widespread shutdown and travel restrictions imposed by almost all countries, all
segments of businesses will be impacted. While medical supplies and pharmaceutical related
business will be asked to step-up their output in the near term, other non-essential and
discretionary spend linked businesses will be negatively impacted.
Businesses without a strong financial grounding may get negatively impacted and will need
some relief from banking and financial institutions to stay afloat, and we are already seeing
banks like SBI stepping in with Emergency Credit Line (CECL) for its business customers to
meet any liquidity mismatch.
In the medium term, if there is a balanced response from Government and businesses,
business will get back to normal and there could be higher buying as witnessed in some of the
Chinese cities with all the pent-up demand bringing in volumes.
In the long term, some of the companies in developed economies may start looking for
alternate vendors in different geographies to mitigate the supply risks to their businesses. This
could bring in huge opportunities to Indian companies provided we as a country act fast on
product development, build additional capacities and remove infrastructure bottlenecks in
anticipation of this demand.
Even though weather is a complex system to predict, advanced systems currently in place
gives vast population some advance warning to minimise casualties. Similarly, Governments
across the world can come together and build something like an early warning system for
epidemics and pandemics and implement a system to contain them quickly. With advances in
technology like AI, machine learning and big data this is possible now more than ever before.
Even though thermal scanners can detect higher body temperatures, there are occasions
where they become ineffective in detection. An infected person can evade thermal scanners
by taking Paracetamol, for example. Infected persons on most occasions do not exhibit any
symptoms or increased body temperature but still can be contagious.
In the past many big businesses in service industry have tried "work from home" as a means
of cutting down costs, giving better work life balance to employees, etc. While it seems to
work in the short term, it becomes counterproductive over a period of time. There are many
reasons for this. Team work reduces. Setting a tone in an office environment is easier than
doing that in it a WFH setup. New team members go through a learning process by observing
and emulating the managers. WFH does not work in areas such as Product development,
Engineering, Problem solving where a team effort is needed to solve problems, bring out a
new innovative idea, etc.
Having said that WFH could work in some of the support functions of a company where
physical presence is not that important.
There is always a trade-off between the level of automation that you want to use, flexibility
that you want in a manufacturing process and cost benefit. Some recent experiences in US
there was an attempt made to use massive scale of automation to ramp up production
volumes but ended up burning a huge amount of cash and reduced production. The reason for
this was, even a small change in production process needed massive amounts of setup change
that slowed down the whole process and became counterproductive. Manufacturing lines
have to be flexible to cater to vast changes in product demand.
While judicious use of automation works as a productivity multiplier, indiscriminate use of
automation will be detrimental to the business. There has been a strong case for automation in
process type of industries and many businesses are already using automation in these spaces.
To avoid total collapse of business, we must have a well-oiled business continuity plan in
place, duly reviewed and updated to handle such crisis and many more that may come in the
future.
#April 2020 Covid Special
To say the world is passing through trying times is to state the obvious. Also evident is the fact that for too long the world has been ignoring the warning signs of environmental degradation fuelled by human excesses and greed. But this is no time for ifs and buts, nor recrimination. Instead, the crisis should be used as an opportunity to make the required course correction to make the world a safer place for all living beings, and the ecological balance, restored.
Industrial Automation invited a cross section of industry leaders to offer their views and possible course of action as a way forward from this situation, even as governments across the world and the people are trying to make sense from the still evolving scenario.
To read the full cover story Please click here
© 2019 IED Communications Ltd | All right reserved. www.industrialautomationindia.in
 }})
