Amit Khanna, Vice President of Business Excellence at Tata Steel Thailand, outlined how digital reliability transitions from isolated plant-floor monitoring to a boardroom-level strategic investment by integrating equipment health data with production process parameters like throughput, energy consumption, and product yield.
How Does Digital Reliability Reach the Boardroom?
Khanna emphasized that digital reliability discussions must reach executive leadership by translating technical metrics into business language: production uptime impact, product yield improvements, and cost-per-ton reductions.
When leadership can see that a monitoring system prevents lost production or extends equipment life, it stops being an experiment and becomes an asset. That visibility is what secures long-term investment.
How Does Equipment Health Data Drive Production?
Tata Steel’s next strategic phase merges vibration and temperature readings with throughput and energy consumption data, transforming digital reliability from reactive problem detection to predictive and prescriptive capabilities.
The goal isn’t just to know whether a motor is healthy—it’s to understand how that condition affects output quality or line efficiency. When those two layers merge, digital reliability stops being reactive and starts becoming predictive and prescriptive.
Khanna also emphasized the importance of understanding residual life—how much useful time remains before a component fails—and using that to plan maintenance intelligently. That’s the kind of insight that saves real money in capital-intensive industries.
What Should a Digital Reliability Partner Deliver?
Khanna outlined three expectations for technology partners: integration connecting machine health with process data, accurate residual life predictions, and production bottleneck identification that solves specific business constraints.
It’s a pragmatic view of vendor relationships: partners are valuable not for the volume of data they deliver, but for how directly they help solve bottlenecks.
How Does Digital Reliability Scale Beyond Pilots?
Digital reliability follows a progression where initial success builds organizational confidence, additional successes secure budgets, and sustained application embeds monitoring systems into operational culture.
The lesson for industrial leaders is clear: success isn’t about having the most connected plant—it’s about having the most connected thinking between people, machines, and processes.
This article was written based on an interview with Amit Khanna, VP Business Excellence – Tata Steel Thailand, recorded live at CXO Circle, Bangkok Edition 2025.
This trip was sponsored by Infinite Uptime.
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