A look into the future
The second biggest innovation driver is digitalization, which relates to efficiency improvements at customer operations within both aggregates and minerals segments. The needs in our customer’s operations are clear: improving availability, productivity, total cost of operations and sustainability utilizing our technological, metallurgical, operational and service capabilities.
Remote monitoring and customer process optimization via our solutions are our key focus areas. We need to know what is happening in our customer’s operations to be able to continue developing our offering. One thing is to monitor their operations, but we also need to be able to offer improved solutions quickly. By combining our and the customer’s digital capabilities, it is possible to provide solutions that improve the customer’s production reliability and efficiency, safety and the overall environmental impact.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI does not happen just by applying some new digital tools. Systems and solutions utilizing AI are built based on our technical expertise and experience. In this case, AI usually refers to the prediction of something such as:
- How a product or solution will work in a specific customer application
- How many weeks the customer will be able to operate with installed products before the energy consumption increases
- When the parts will wear out before a change is needed
- Which out of many proposals is the best solution to fulfill the targets of a specific customer
- How we should analyze, improve and use large quantities of data from which we can recognize commonalities that support us in providing recommendations or solutions that better respond to our customer needs or internal operational improvements?
There are many use cases for AI – many of which are already in development, but we will surely discover more as technology evolves.
We work closely with our colleagues in other Metso Outotec businesses in order to keep developing the best possible solution for our customers. Complemented with engineering efficiency and different internal tools to simulate, configure and automate our own design and operations as well as our Field Service capabilities, we can safely say that digitalization and automation plays a major role already now, but it will continue gaining increasingly more speed going forward.