With the ever-evolving digital disruption, c-level executives have now started to understand the significance of digitising the supply chain. However, many enterprises lack basic strategising and direction, and therefore fail to be relevant to their industries. Successful organisations aim to fill in their technology gaps with a clear digital framework which can advance their supply chain performance.

The average supply chain has a digitisation level of 43%, the lowest of five business areas that were examined. A mere 2% of the surveyed executives said the supply chain is the focus of their digital strategies, which hasn’t much changed over the years.

However, Hindustan Zinc had their priorities right. In a bid to staying relevant in their industry, the zinc-lead miner has partnered with FarEye, a SaaS-based predictive logistics platform, to omit their dependency on manual processes, and enhance their logistics efficiency to reduce risks.

The Challenge

Hindustan Zinc (HZL) was facing incidents of thefts, which is relatively common for any organisation of such a stature which deal with high-value material and have complex logistic operations. With five lead-zinc mines, one rock phosphate mine, four hydro-metallurgical zinc smelters, two lead smelters, one pyro-metallurgical lead-zinc smelter as well as sulphuric acid and captive power plants in northwest India, HZL has a metal production capacity of 834,000 MT of zinc and 2,01,000 MT of lead. HZL also has facilities located in varied areas like Rampura Agucha, Chanderiya, Dariba, Kayad and Zawar in the state of Rajasthan, along with zinc-lead processing and refining facilities and a silver refinery at Pantnagar in the state of Uttarakhand. To run such a complex operation, HZL required a heavy digitisation framework, which could not only enhance their business but also automate a lot of processes to reduce the turnaround time.

According to the company, there has been an immense demand for zinc in India, with 70% of it coming from the galvanising sector, which is witnessing rising penetration of galvanised steel in domestic car models. Also, the on-going restructuring of the steel industry and adherence to upcoming IS277 coating standards bodes well for zinc consumption in India. Alloys & die-cast alloys also gaining its prominence and applications across several sectors. 

Along with improving the delivery turnaround time, it also wanted to eliminate dependencies on manual work, improve in-plant efficiency and simplify logistics operations. And therefore an advanced solution was required that could automate the entire logistics value chain in conjunction with various other systems.

The Solution

To revolutionise the mining and zinc industry, FarEye was on-boarded to enable predictive visibility and automate HZL’s logistics operations. The machine learning and IoT powered platform gave greater control over both in-bound and out-bound logistics movement and provided real-time visibility across the entire logistics value chain. The platform was designed to assist HZL in executing, tracking, collaborating, predicting and optimising the movement of their goods. 

FarEye’s platform leverages GPS, RFID and digital locks technologies to drive actionable analytics around stakeholders and vehicle performances to identify bottlenecks and their workaround. This platform also integrates disparate systems like the Transport Management System (TMS) and Core SAP-ERP system, which orchestrates data flow and drives automated decision making with regards to operational execution.

One of the critical elements of the solution is the Centralised Digital Control Tower (DCT), which has been powered by FarEye’s platform. This control tower proactively triggers distributed notifications based on built-in smart logic, directly to the concerned stakeholder related to exceptions such as delays, theft suspicion, SoP non-compliance, expiring documentation etc. and provides simple and fast resolution workflows.

Benefits

With this Logistics Control Tower empowering Hindustan Zinc managed to reduce their turnaround and transit times, and also the related costs. Not only it ensured faster resolution of exceptions but also achieved a perfect order index. Logistics stakeholders could now quickly analyse all the critical KPIs like transporter performance, route efficiency and other SLA adherence, loading/unloading times, invoice accuracy, fleet productivity and more. It also improved the Turn Around Time (TAT) of in-pant and in-transit logistics movements and therefore decreasing their operations cost.

Chief Commercial Officer at Hindustan Zinc Limited — Sharad Gargiya said that the FarEye’s platform had enhanced the efficiency of HZL’s supply chain and operations. “The platform is enabling Hindustan Zinc to have control over more than 30,000 trips every month with zero manual intervention,” — by automating the entire logistics value chain, said Gargiya.

He explained that the machine learning capabilities have been generating accurate ETAs for Hindustan Zinc’s customers, which also made the planning of routes efficiently. The system has therefore been applied to all HZL’s plant, mines, smelters, and ports. 

When asked FarEye, Suryansh Jalan, President at the FarEye Transportation said that with the increasing number of vehicles, trips, and transporters of HZL, ensuring a 100% safety and compliances across all the vehicles became a complicated process. And, “this is where FarEye’s Digital Control Tower (DCT) comes in.”

“From monitoring and managing KPIs, running distributed exception handling, providing real-time visibility, to reducing logistics costs, DCT has empowered Hindustan Zinc to transform its logistics operations completely,” Jalan concluded.

HZL has been awarded the ‘Outstanding Digital Transformation in Supply Chain’ award at the Express Logistics and Supply Chain Conclave, 2019.