Prashant Sinha, Head of Marketing, WIKA India, talks about the expertise and innovation in measurement technology, ensuring precision and reliability in various industrial environments and the role of stainless steel in manufacturing of these instruments, with Kanishka Ramchandani.

Tell us about the range of products manufactured by WIKA India and their USPs.

WIKA is a German-based company, founded in 1946. It specialises in measuring equipment. Any measuring instrument required for any application, be it pressure, be it temperature, be it force, flow, level or any other kind of measurement, wherever required in any application, we manufacture it. We are the only company in the world that manufactures all the measuring points, wherever it is required.

You will find many companies in the market who are only into pressure and temperature, or level or force, but not manufacturers of all categories required by industries. That is why we do not call ourselves a generalist, we call ourselves a specialist in measurement technology. Ours is a 76 year old organisation.

How much stainless steel do you use in manufacturing these products?

We do use stainless steel in some of our product ranges. If we talk about the measuring instruments, it plays a very critical role in the steel industry. In the production of our materials, there is a requirement of decarbonisation and sustainability. These products are exposed to hazardous atmospheres, like oil and gas, where there are chances for corrosion. This is where we can’t compromise by using other materials, and use stainless steel in all of our pressure gauges.

Another factor is chemical resistance. Stainless steel is highly resistant to corrosion from a wide range of chemicals, including acids, alkaline, chlorides. Our products go deep inside oil and chemicals, therefore, have to be made up of that particular component which doesn’t get affected by those hazardous chemicals. These are two things which are very important for us.

Apart from that, obviously, there is durability and strength. Stainless steel has a high tensile strength. Withstanding high pressure is a very important factor for our kind of products and for all of our customer needs and their process application. 

Fatigue resistance is also important because of the cyclic loading which should happen without significant degradation. That is vital for pressure gauges.

For our products, we need these particular characteristics from stainless steel and there are many parameters, which we consider, to make stainless steel the material to use and not any other materials or substances. 

Which other materials do you use?

Aluminium is a substitute that we use in certain applications. Polycarbonate is also used in the making of pumps and pressure, in the compression market where again, stainless steel is used in some parts of it, but the entire structure is made up of polycarbonate or some other material. 

We do a lot of skin manufacturing. Majorly in the oil and gas industry, in the power transmission, in the power generation, entire transformers are set up on the skin. That skin sometimes is made of stainless steel where then the application is on the hazardous side, but it can be done on the aluminium and the sheet steel also.

Since your products are used under strenuous circumstances, what kind of rigourous quality standards and protocols do you have in place?

Any manufacturing organisation, especially like stainless steel instrument production, has a Quality Management System (QMS). Our quality standards include ISO 9001 & ISO 14001.

Speaking of quality management, material standard and specification is very important. There are bodies like the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which standardised the designs and fabrication of the pressure-containing parts. These are the two certifications that we always take for all our plant operations in India. 

We have four plant operations in India. One in Faridabad, one in Ghaziabad, one in Chennai, one is in Pune. Pune is the biggest plant having six production sites. And all of our production sites are certified with ISO 9001, ISO 14001.

For all the material we use, and for the entire value chain we ensure that they also have this kind of quality management system and the material standard system.

There are a lot of innovations that are taking place in stainless steel, such as the concept of super alloys are coming up. Are these innovations going to impact the way you use stainless steel?

The future of stainless steel innovation will drive a significant investment in the product quality, because everybody is talking about sustainability. And in sustainability, there is development of the high performance alloys, and green production techniques. There are a lot of companies, such as Jindal Steel, that have already adopted these kinds of techniques for high performance alloys. 

These green production techniques will enhance not only durability, but reduce the environmental impact also. That is something that the government is also focusing on. Apart from that, everybody is now talking about digitalisation, the integration of Industry 4.0. 

There are still a lot of orthodox companies that are not investing on the intelligence in their process, which is ultimately impacting the environment with lots of things. If you can’t measure the emissions within your process, then it cannot be controlled. That is why integration of IOT 4.0 is very important, which will streamline the manufacturing process, improve productive maintenance, and obviously ensure real time quality insurance. 

Additionally, maybe I can talk about some smart material and surface technology and will expand the application possibility. For example, if we do some strict regulatory compliance and improve our safety protocol, which will anyway ensure the higher standard and the safer workplace for all the workers. So, when we talk about advancement, we should not only talk about the product, but we should talk about how this advancement will help in achieving sustainability, how this advancement will help in the kind of digitalisation and impacting human lives in a better way. 

Our company is doing a lot of initiatives on CSR, on sustainability. All four plants are equipped with solar panels, and we are utilising 54 per cent of our energy through solar power.

Because of government policy, we cannot function with solar power beyond that point. We believe that sustainability initiatives should start on home grounds and only then we come in a position to influence others. This is something that we’ve implemented and can see changing in the future for the better.

How important is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the manufacturing process?

If you look at the WIKA logo, it talks about WIKA Smart in Sensing. This is something we have recently changed. Earlier our tagline was, ‘Part of Your Business.’ Things are now moving towards digitalisation and all our products are IoT communicable products, where everything can be connected to some protocol, communication protocol and that result can be monitored on a dashboard.

We have also started IoT integration 4.0, everything within ourselves first, just to ensure that whatever we are talking to the customer, we are getting that in-house. All our machines are interconnected and communicating, which is visible on a common dashboard.

This allows us to easily check things from a remote distance or sitting at my office. I can check the connectivity of the Chennai plant, about how my machines are working, what is the efficiency time, what is the idle time, what is the efficiency of the machine in terms of production etc. In a similar manner, we are now coming up very aggressively on the IoT part. There are 50 billion measuring points worldwide as instruments, out of which we have supplied almost 1 billion. Therefore, we cater to almost 2 per cent of those parts, where we have supplied those points, which can be connected through IoT. 

I’m not saying that currently it is an IoT, but there is a way out that we can go and connect back to those customers and convert them or educate them into how to connect your entire application to IoT, so that predictive maintenance can be done, diagnosis can be done, monitoring can be done. IoT allows us to predict anything that is about to happen. That’s the advantage. 

What are the key points of your sustainability report? 

There are usually 3 to 4 defined ESGs.

When the United Nations launched their sustainable SGD policies, there were 3 major things. What is important is Scope 1 and Scope 2, which is actually your in-house part, which you can do on your own. Scope 3 is actually for the external part, where you do not have. 

We have replaced everything with the LPG and the CHG cylinder. While there isn’t zero carbon emission from all of our plants, we have undertaken many initiatives in the packaging like removing all the plastic parts from the packaging and introducing pulp packaging, which is environment friendly. None of our plants use plastic. It’s all biodegradable pulp. 

We have worked on zero water wastage, where we have saved close to 1.3 billion litres of water in the last year. And all of that going back to our plant. If you visit any of our plants, you will see 70 per cent of the green area. We also do a lot of plantations in house. Any kind of waste water goes back into the ground, which previously wasn’t possible because of government policies.

At all of our plants, we have canteens and many fruits and vegetables have been planted inside our plants that are served in the canteen. However, due to the STP policy, now it doesn’t happen. We are trying to make our plants a zero waste zone in all aspects. 

We are doing a lot of CSR and sustainability. We have awards and subsidies also to encourage this behaviour with all our employees in-house.