Could you remind us of Siemens’ capabilities in the chemical and pharma markets in Southeast Asia?

Siemens has been in ASEAN for over 100 years. Singapore serves as a regional HQ for our digital industries, smart infrastructure and Siemens mobility business. Besides Singapore, we also have local offices in the six largest countries in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines) where we have a strong presence for our chemical and pharma verticals. Within that vertical, we draw from a diverse talent pool across the region, with our head for measurement intelligence (smart instrumentation like positioners, valves, flow meters, temperature transmitter) based in Vietnam, while the head for digital connectivity and power (so everything industrial communication, identification and locating, 5G, cybersecurity) is in Thailand. From this robust regional network, we can support our customers with software and hardware solutions to address their current challenges. 

What drove the investment in a new advanced factory in Singapore?

The pandemic has shown everybody the importance of a secure supply chain, particularly for critical components, so the driver of this investment was to be closer to our customers in Southeast Asia, India, and Australia. Siemens will produce a range of industrial and automation products here, things like PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) and HMIs (human-machine interfaces). 

Singapore stood out as the best all-round destination for many reasons, including a transparent, pro-business environment with a high level of governance; excellent infrastructure in the context of communication, power, and logistics; and Singapore has a comprehensive Singapore Green Plan 2030, which we are committed to support. 

What could breakthroughs in gen AI models mean for the chemical and process industries?

In the process industries we have successfully applied AI in various contexts, such as predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, reinforcement learning, plant operations, and AI recommender systems.

Generative AI, or GenAI, represents another breakthrough in AI technology, with the potential to revolutionize the way chemical companies design processes, engineer, operate, maintain, and optimize their assets through the entire lifecycle. However, it is important to understand its place within the broader context of industrial AI. While AI techniques focus on generating new data and insights based on existing information, mechanistic modeling takes a different approach. Mechanistic models, as we provide with gPROMS (Siemens' technology-leading family of modeling environments) rely on a fundamental understanding of the underlying physical and chemical processes. These models require less data for calibration, enable extrapolations, and can predict process dynamics. In the case that there are gaps in fundamental scientific understanding scientific hybrid models can combine the strengths of mechanistic modeling with the data-driven elements of AI techniques. 

Today, energy and chemicals companies are already using gPROMS to accelerate new sustainable process development and enhance process economics through true process optimization. 

At Siemens, we follow a clear vision to deploy Siemens Industrial Copilots along the entire value chain, combining mechanistic models, AI techniques like GenAI, and other Advanced Process Control technologies. Those Copilots have the potential to revolutionize the chemical industry, making operations more efficient, sustainable, and productive.

Could you tell us more about Siemens’ global DEGREE framework and how is this deployed at a local level?

DEGREE is an acronym that stands for decarbonization, ethics, governance, resource efficiency, equity, and employability. To give some examples of how we run this in the region, we always choose facilities that are certified “Green Buildings” for any new locations. In our Siemens Center in Singapore, which is owned by CapitalLand, we designed an efficient centralized water-cooled chiller plant room that would assist The Siemens Centre in meeting Singapore's Building Construction Authority (BCA)'s Green Mark GoldPlus status. The Siemens Centre is linked to the Siemens Advanced Service Centre (ASC) which monitors the energy consumption of the buildings online in real-time to make adjustments immediately when anomalies from target values are detected. 

Within the “R” (Resource efficiency & circularity) we focus on how we can apply our robust-eco-design (RED) standard for the design of environmentally friendly products to 100% of our relevant product families.