Schneider Electric’s India Smart Factory: Creating A Sustainable Value Chain

The year was 2021. At his Gurugram office in Haryana, India, Anil Chaudhry, Zone President and Managing Director of Schneider Electric India Private Limited (SEIPL), sat working on his keynote address for a conference. He had been invited to present a globally relevant business case on energy-efficient practices for digital transformation and their application in the larger business ecosystem. SEIPL was a subsidiary of Schneider Electric (SE). The French industrial giant SE was a global leader in energy management and industrial automation and delivered solutions spanning hardware, software, and services. SE was also among the Fortune Global 500. Chaudhry was keen on showcasing the company’s success in implementing digital transformation. The SE audit team found that SEIPL’s Hyderabad factory (in Telangana) pioneered automated tools in 2016 when terms such as “Industry 4.0” and “digitalization” were thin on the ground. The factory successfully converted a brownfield facility into a smart factory in 2019, implementing EcoStruxure, a platform for accelerating digital transformation. Chaudhry had to address multiple questions based on the learnings and takeaways from the implementation at Hyderabad: Why did the need for creating a smart factory arise? How did this lead to digital transformation across the value chain? Were such implementations scalable? Could other industry players replicate this success by converting their non-IIoT -enabled facilities into smart factories? What aspects did organizations need to focus on while planning for such a transformation?