23 Jan 2018 - The world leader in gases, technologies and services for Industry and Health, Air Liquide inaugurated today its Smart Innovative Operations (SIO) Center for the Southeast Asia Pacific region, located in Malaysia. The SIO Center enables the remote management of production for 18 Air Liquide units spanning eight countries across the region, as well as optimizing energy consumption and improving reliability at these sites. Air Liquide is investing €20 million (RM96 million) in this project.

The SIO Center, located in Kuala Lumpur, integrates, optimises and remotely controls the operations of Air Liquide’s production units, leveraging predictive analytics and digital technologies. These capabilities allow Air Liquide to better predict and accommodate changing customer needs across the region, especially regarding the supply of oxygen, nitrogen, argon and hydrogen.

Thanks to Big Data and human intelligence, the workflow of each Air Liquide unit linked to the SIO Center is adapted in real time to the needs of each customer. In this way, SIO enables 24/7 responsiveness to customer demands, improves production-unit energy efficiency, and leverages predictive maintenance to ensure continuous facility run-time.

The new SIO Center is a key component of Air Liquide’s Regional Hub for Southeast Asia and the Pacific region, which already houses a Financial Shared Services Center which centralizes key financial functions across the region. In the connected plants, Air Liquide has also developed new technologies to simplify maintenance and inspection management operations, from connected glasses that allow the operator to interface with an expert located elsewhere to realistically simulated virtual reality-based training. Air Liquide has also introduced a virtual help desk to support operational management.

François Abrial, Executive Vice-President, Asia Pacific, said: “We are proud to choose Malaysia as the location for our newest SIO Center. The new SIO Center in Kuala Lumpur complements our similar center which opened in Shanghai in September. The highly promising Malaysia market offers a solid IT infrastructure and is bolstered by the Government’s current efforts to build a critical mass of talent skilled in Big Data analysis. We are also grateful for the strong support from our key industry players, including our partners InvestKL and MDEC.

This new Center illustrates Air Liquide’s commitment to its customer-centric strategy and is concrete evidence of the Group’s digital transformation. Going forward, we will continue offering our customers operational excellence and developing innovative solutions to address their emerging business challenges.”

Datuk Zainal Amanshah, CEO InvestKL, said ‘We are proud to the be part of Air Liquide’s journey, which joins the long list of Multinationals that have called Greater Kuala Lumpur their Regional hub. This SIO Centre illustrates the ability of our Malaysian talent being in the forefront of Industry 4.0 and Digitalization. This is also a strong endorsement to the Malaysian eco-system, and a testament that our talent are of high-quality and of global standards. I congratulate Air Liquide on this historic launch and look forward to the continuous collaboration between Air Liquide and InvestKL.”