Although a condiment so often shunned in modern urban coffee culture for all manner of reasons, when next grasping for your life-giving morning fix perhaps spare a few second’s of admiration for the extraordinary processes that have brought those tempting white or brown sugar crystals ever within reach.
The journey from grass stalk to barista counter is a long and arduous tale indeed- And yes, sugar cane, like bamboo, is very much a grass.
Early life through to adolescence within a canebrake is reasonably unexciting. Swarms of rats and other furries will scamper about the undergrowth. And as with any baking tropical or sub-tropical field, quivers of venomous snakes will slither and nest betwixt the tangled foliage, suitably enlivening the mood.
And then very sudden is the termination of sedentary life brought about, either by means of mechanical harvesting guillotine, or if perhaps less fortunate, being forced to endure the intense flash of a controlled burn and a subsequent macheted felling. The quiet of a short-lived conveyance to the mill is little respite for the pending industrial butchery awaiting the harvested cane in which the population of sucrose lies entrapped.
Post a welcoming of shredding and crushing, the cane juice so extracted is dosed to saturation with chemicals and then dehydrated through an intensive, multi-phase boiling into a syrup. Step by step and layer by layer, peripherals and undesirables are being clawed away as the steaming agro-industrial leviathan marches its targeted substance towards purification and finally crystallisation, through dozens of kilometres of pipes and seemingly endless tanks or vessels of some form or another. Life as an aspiring sugar crystal is not for the faint of heart.
This personification is, of course, no more than jocular verbiage. Perhaps well in excess of that at all interesting to the reader. But what the passage intends to express is the dramatic complexity and high-friction nature of the sugar production industrial system. A complexity and friction shared with other domains of primary industry, or exceeded to some degree as is the case with underground mining.
A supply chain complexity thoroughly underestimated by the great majority of consumers, business people, technocrats and politicians alike, as has been so evidenced in the seemingly widely held belief that the economy at large, and industrial systems in particular, can be activated and deactivated without severe consequences by means of presidential or other public address from whatever officialdom. The passage from grass to crystal, and onward to readily available packaged condiment is, unfortunately, insufficiently trivial to prove impervious to diktat. The same can be said of that of orebody to ingot, cathode sheet, billet or whatever tradable commoditised form of mineral. ‘Real’ economy process necessitate a continuity of vitality as if an actual ecosystem. Nor can they readily sustain the comprehensive symptoms of long-run deindustrialisation. Accordingly, the implications of baseload power interruptions and enforced cessations of operations are to industrial processes what unbridled deforestation is to a natural environment - somewhere on the scale between disastrous and existential.
It is for precisely these hyper-complex processes, which require being commercially and ecologically sustainable in an ever more unpredictable global dynamic, that Nanodyn develops its technologies and services. Frontier innovation technologies which utilise Machine Learning to optimise industrial systems in real-time. Technologies which increase energy efficiency, increase throughput, de-clutter operations, generate predictable and repeatable operational cadence, diminish uncertainties, enhance the life of capital assets, augment human expertise, enable doctrinal optimisation and, most importantly, directly impact the bottom line. Real technologies, with real impact, for the real economy.
The industrial sector is hard, and it’s problems are hard to solve. At Nanodyn we like hard problems and the measurable impact that their resolution brings about. A manifestation and quantum of impact entirely unobtainable without the development and application of such new generation technologies and services. The impact of more humans and newer assets only achieves so much, if anything at all, as sometimes the unintended consequences thereof is simply enhanced operational complexity. Conversely, utilising data from an ever more data-rich and data-heterogeneous operational environment to intelligently optimise the assets and augment the humans already in place is the means by which large, enduring process efficiency outcomes are attainable. And attainable quickly. Use data (Don’t just capture and store it), generate actionable intelligence, do so in real-time, and work far smarter. Measurably and empirically smarter. Data is a resource as important as the focal product itself.
However, given that industrial systems are just that - systems - they require being optimised with a systemic or near-systemic view. Whole process blocks, plants, fleets or supply chains need to fall within a data-driven optimisation strategy. And then optimisation gains must be targeted and achieved on a logical, incremental and phased basis. In order to be of maximum and sustained impact, a holistic optimisation posture is necessary.
This is often the impediment faced by many industrial enterprises - the lack of adopting a holistic view, and working towards systemic objectives in a thoughtful and measured manner. It also demands a strategic supplier in possession of both the consulting acumen to assist in identifying the appropriate optimisation strategy, as well as the technological and R&D acumen to deliver the optimisation outcomes. One of Nanodyn’s differentiators is this duality of competency - process and technological expertise, a rare combination indeed. A hybrid competency for a hybrid World.
Our Machine Learning-driven Advanced Process Control technologies are transformative. We are early innovators in a thoroughly complex domain. And it is difficult imparting the necessity of a mindset shift within heavy industry away from traditional fixed-price consulting engineering and towards an intelligence driven and performance-linked service delivered over the long-term. Corporate HQs in particular find such notions as appetising as modifying accounting policy. Dogma is the principle barrier to entry for innovation.
However, the escarpment of challenges facing capital intensive industry - those of prolonged high inflation, insufficient supply chain redundancy, declining skills availability, growing compliance requirements, the myriad of deindustrialisation implications, and underwhelming government policy amongst others - are not due to abate within the foreseeable future. Thus, a revolution in thinking to encompass a strategic technological vision beyond the immediate and throughly engrossing demands of day-to-day operations or financial performance reporting is an inescapable requirement for long-term enterprise survival. A multiple horizon journey into the future must be charted for the enterprise to secure the weather gauge under sail, and not to be buffeted upon the waves as a vessel all but technologically rudderless.
A new dawn of technologies beckons. And the light of immense possibility grows richer and more expansive. Laggards will die. And the innovators and early adopters will reach and rise.
Welcome 2023 and all that lies in wait for us to achieve. It requires but the audacity to reimagine that which is possible.
May it be a good year for all.
Mr. Andrew Charter, CEO at Nanodyn
