Asian Paints, India’s leading and one of the top 10 coatings companies in the world, has selected Sight Machine for its unique ability to use AI to combine production data from hundreds of assets into digital twins of the production process.

The deployment of Sight Machine’s data analytics platform by Asian Paints across its network of manufacturing plants in India is intended to transform production data into insights for increasing productivity and efficiency. The initiative will collect and analyze the data produced by machines across the company’s Indian manufacturing footprint, searching for insights leading to better business decisions and increased returns.

Asian Paints initially deployed Sight Machine’s platform at its Sriperumbudur plant near Chennai. Within weeks, Sight Machine helped Asian Paints reduce considerable cycle time on the first targeted production line. Asian Paints team members working with the Sight Machine platform also identified 41 additional opportunities to improve productivity using data patterns at the Sriperumbudur plant alone, with six of those projects completed within eight weeks.

Asian Paints, founded in 1942, is known as one of India’s most technology-savvy manufacturers and was named by Forbes as one of the world’s 10 most-innovative companies in 2017. Information technology has long played a central role at the company, where computerization of operations began in the 1970s, followed by deployment of a series of innovative IT applications for supply chain optimization and customer engagement.

“As an insight-driven company, we searched the world for the most advanced and scalable manufacturing analytics technology to use across our facilities to drive better decisions,” said Harish Lade, Vice President, Supply Chain for Asian Paints. “Sight Machine gave us unique insights into what is happening in our production lines in the first factory where we deployed the solution. The proposition is to deploy this across our factories, which will enable us to be a more data-driven and agile organization.”

Asian Paints did not have comprehensive visibility into the interdependent factors affecting production. The complex interdependencies between machines, process parameters and materials made it difficult and time consuming to determine the root causes of the issues and optimize production cycles.

Sight Machine’s platform transformed plant data into a digital twin of the entire production process, identifying and quantifying contention and bottlenecks. Asian Paints was able to reduce cycle time on one of the key production lines at one of its plants by seven percent, delivering very good potential return from the initial project alone.

“Asian Paints has truly embraced the power of data,” said Sight Machine CEO and Co-Founder Jon Sobel. “The company has demonstrated what earned it the reputation as one of India’s most innovative companies. Asian Paints has already recognized tremendous value on its initial deployment, and will now extend the power of this platform across the enterprise.”