Streamlining and centralizing assets, people and processes, HCE’s software solutionst help customers make smarter, more accurate business decisions.
Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE), the software arm of Honeywell, delivers innovative technologies to tackle some of the toughest challenges in energy, security, safety, and sustainability. A leading industrial disruptor, HCE builds and connects software solutions to streamline and centralize assets, people and processes that help Honeywell’s customers make smarter, more accurate business decisions.
Developed by HCE, Honeywell Forge is an innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that leverages advanced data analytics to solve complex business problems by integrating typically siloed operations. With a focus on maximizing efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability, Honeywell Forge can bring together operational assets, equipment, and business processes, providing users with a centralized view of their entire enterprise.
With a strong India presence, HCE eyes a significant pie of the India market with cutting edge solutions to handle challenges in energy, security, safety, and sustainability.
Meticulously crafted to tackle complex challenges by leveraging advanced data analytics and optimizing efficiency, safety, effectiveness, and overall profitability, Honeywell Forge brings in innovative SaaS features to transform businesses.
– Kap Prabhakaran, Vice President, Engineering, Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE), India
Kap Prabhakaran, Vice President, Engineering, Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE), India, had spoken to SME Channels on some of the key business and technology issues concerning HCE.
As Engineering Leader for Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE), India, Kap leads HCE India as a technology hub to drive exponential growth. He also oversees all product development and talent management. He is responsible for developing a long-term engineering vision and direction, driving the creation of next generation product functionality, and establishing processes and methods that ensure a high level of productivity, accountability, and ownership across the engineering team.
Prior to this, Kap was Aerospace Engineering Leader for Honeywell Technology Solutions (HTS), the technology development and engineering arm of Honeywell.Since joining HTS in 1995, Kap has held several leadership roles, including setting up multiple global Centres of Excellence (CoEs), leading diverse teams across product lines, sites and countries.
In this SME Channels exclusive, Kap Prabhakaran, Vice President, Engineering, Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE), India, discusses his core focus areas, his expectations from the market, the kinds of business pains addressed by Honeywell Forge, the tech innovations at HCE, how his organization is helping to secure enterprises, and much more. Edited Excerpts…
Would you please give a brief overview of Honeywell Connected Enterprise in India?
Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE), the software arm of Honeywell, has developed Honeywell Forge – an innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that leverages advanced data analytics to solve complex business problems by integrating typically siloed operations. With a focus on maximizing efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability, Honeywell Forge can bring together operational assets, equipment, and business processes, providing users with a centralized view of their entire enterprise.
Both Honeywell and Honeywell Connected Enterprise have a strong employee presence in India.Honeywell India employees deliver innovative technologies to customers in tackling some of the toughest challenges in energy, security, safety, and sustainability. Honeywell Connected Enterprise has employees in various regions of the world, but we also have a very strong and skilled team here in India. Our team has leading software development skills along with deep domain experience across many different industries.
The team here is working on new and enhanced solutions across a number of verticals including industrials, buildings, life sciences, supply chain, aerospace and many more. The skills of our employee base cross a very large spectrum but include experts in areas as diverse as software development, data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
What are your core focus areas?
Honeywell Forge software unites real time data across assets, people and processes to drive intelligent operations. It empowers decision making to surface inefficiencies, mitigate risk and reduce cost. Built to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges, Honeywell Forge solutions serve customers in industries including aerospace, life sciences, buildings, industrials, warehouses and more. Honeywell Forge solutions to helps our customers to accelerate their digitilization, sustainability and OT cybersecurity initiatives.
Honeywell Forge focuses on:
Portfolio: Better plan and prioritize investments with near real-time site-to-site comparisons and analytics
Site: Digitize manual processes and enable remote operations while better managing inventory
Asset: Improve productivity and negotiate more transparent and cost-effective maintenance contracts
Energy: Reduce spend and carbon emissions by automating energy management and KPIs
Worker: Enhance safety and compliance, digitize manual processes, and better equip workers for complex tasks
What’s your expectations from the market this year?
Honeywell has a very strong presence in India, and we are expecting a robust growth in the market this year. Digital transformation is a journey and Honeywell’s long experience in process control, cybersecurity and managed performance will take business operations to the next level. India is leading the global digital transformational journey and known for innovating in the digital space.
As India focuses on enhancing itsmanufacturing prowess and embedding itself as a preferred hub across global valuechains, digital transformation on the back of emerging technologies, such as AI, ML, IoT,robotics, blockchain, and cloud computing, will drive economic value. With the adventof the Industry 4.0, variousemerging technologies are being leveraged atan accelerated rate to enhance competitiveness.
Harnessing the full potential of these newtechnologies to strengthen competitiveness willhave to be supported by policy frameworksthat ensure such technologies work responsiblyfor people and the planet.
We have aligned our product portfolio with the Indian market which sees a growth in infrastructure, air travel, giga factories, data centers, energy transition and are expecting a rapid expansion across the segment. Our Honeywell Forge suites for buildings, industrials, cybersecurity, sustainability are part of our outcome-based solutions and we believe the offerings will play a major role in driving digital transformation, sustainability, workforce productivity, quality, and OT cybersecurity initiatives
Please shed some light on Honeywell Forge. What kind of business problems is it solving?
Honeywell Forge brings innovative SaaS features to revolutionize and transform businesses. It has been meticulously crafted to tackle complex challenges by leveraging advanced data analytics and optimizing efficiency, safety, effectiveness, and overall profitability. This solution is designed to facilitate smooth adoption while keeping macro business objectives at the forefront, enabling a swift and efficient operations transformation.
Honeywell Forge leverages predictive analytics, which is one of its USPs to identify challenges and provides timely actionable information. With the help of real-time monitoring, it also manages to enhance the productivity and significantly reduce the operational cost.
We are thriving to provide a comprehensive and centralized view of the entire enterprise to our users driven by the business intelligence through our solutions. In order to optimizethe building management system, it offers numerous features to create a user-friendly ecosystem for the residents and owners providing contactless and auto adjustable comfort levels. Simultaneously, it also provides advantages to the building operators such as maintenance alerts, energy optimization and remote management, contributing to improved efficiency and sustainability. By optimizing the operational processes and unifying IT and OT data, it also helps in identifying failures before they occur which further enables the operators to maintain longevity and reduce cost.
With its transformative solutions, Honeywell Forge has delivered measurable benefits by identifying potential threats and helping toreduce energy consumption.
Please detail us on the technological innovations undertaken at HCE
With rapidly evolving digital transformation, we need to keep pace with the changes and introduce solutions basis the need of the customers. Our key focus areas are digitalization, sustainability and cybersecurity and we are ensuring timely implementation of innovative and up-to-date vertical specific solutions focusing across industries. Some of the latest innovations are as follows:
- Honeywell Forge Performance for Industrials | Production Intelligence: Advanced analytics to drive actionable insight, maximize plant’s productivity, reduce risk, avoid downtime, enhance the worker productivity by 30%
- Honeywell Process Digital Twin: Honeywell Process Digital Twin provides an unparalleled view into the past (troubleshooting and root cause analysis), present (track KPI’s) and future (prediction) for the process and associated assets – all in a virtual environment that does not risk costly downtime in the real plant.
- Honeywell Forge Sustainability for Buildings | Carbon and Energy Management:Helps building owners and operators monitor, control and optimize energy use and carbon emissions data, while maintaining an optimal indoor environment.
- Honeywell Connected Workforce Competency:Training tool that accelerate speed to workforce competency. Helps trainees gain both knowledge and experience to handle complex situations and execute analysis and decision-making tasks while being mentored
- Honeywell Forge Cybersecurity | Cyber Insights: This on-premise solution provides access to near real-time and historical data on vulnerabilities, compliance, and threats to help organizations reduce cyber risks and manage compliance.
Our solutions are intended to bring valuable and profitable outcomes by using the industrial data. We are relentlessly working to be on top of our game to serve our customers with outcome-based solutions.
How does Honeywell Forge Cybersecurity help secure enterprises?
Increase in the cloud adoption has led to a huge concern regarding the protection of customer data, which is a topmost priority for us at Honeywell. Our products and solutions are designed in a way that ensures high-level security to the customer data.While our engineers are focused on developing safe and threat resilient software, we also encourage our customers to understand the importance of cybersecurity and adopt practices that will protect them from any such malware.
Honeywell Forge Cyber Insights solution is an operational technology (OT) cybersecurity solution that is designed by Honeywell to help users manage risks by providing a comprehensive view into identified vulnerabilities and threats that may affect or are affecting the user’s industrial control systems (ICS) as well as supporting their compliance requirements.Developed by Honeywell’s experienced OT cybersecurity professionals, Cyber Insights is an on-premise solution that helps industrial organizations gain much-needed visibility into their OT cybersecurity posture.Developed by Honeywell’s experienced OT cybersecurity professionals, Cyber Insights is an on-premise solution that helps industrial organizations gain much-needed visibility into their OT cybersecurity posture.Cyber Insights is capable of integrating with many other Honeywell and third-party security solutions already deployed at the customer’s site.
With Cyber Insights, Honeywell delivers a pre-configured solution to allow for rapid on-site installation and setup by Honeywell OT cybersecurity engineers, so on-site staff can quickly leverage the valuable, curated information available through Cyber Insights to assist them in improving their site’s cybersecurity posture.
How Honeywell Forge is enabling predictive maintenance for buildings aligning with the trends in the segment?
Building transformation begins with data. Honeywell Forge Performance+ for Buildings provides a common platform that provides real-time predictive analytics, equipment models and easy-to-use dashboards that work together to show current building performance.
Our predictive maintenance solutions provide monitor asset performance, occupant comfort, remotely monitor and control assets and resolves service cases. By leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, our teams identify potential threat in real-time and are able to address it efficiently. By addressing issues before they escalate, it assists in saving time and cost associated with equipment and services.
With the Honeywell Forge SaaS solution, we offer advanced analytical data to empower technicians and maintenance teams with valuable insights. These insights prove invaluable in anticipating and preventing potential faults and issues, effectively eliminating the risks associated with unforeseen faulty maintenance problems.
Our utmost dedication lies in offering customers a safe and user-friendly environment, and we are constantly striving to optimize our operations to deliver efficient solutions. With our versatile technologies, manual monitoring is completely eliminated, resulting in risk-free buildings and keeping us well prepared to tackle any potential threats proactively.
