In an effort to accelerate its digitisation journey, Sasol has employed a mobile private network (MPN) from Vodacom Business at its synthetic fuel facility in Secunda, Mpumalanga.
The collaboration, according to Vodacom, marks a significant milestone in leveraging technology to enhance operational efficiency and connectivity in the industrial sector.
The telco says the MPN offers future-proof, secure and robust connectivity so businesses can address key safety, efficiency and visibility concerns. By leveraging a single network to create a connected environment, a mine or a giant petrochemical facility, organisations can better understand key performance drivers, reduce operational outages and extend asset life.
The MPN solution integrates Vodacom's network infrastructure with Sasol's systems, enhancing connectivity to employees, equipment and assets, Vodacom notes. The solution enables real-time and remote monitoring, improves safety and compliance, streamlines asset management, boosts collaboration and optimises overall operational efficiency.
The network enables optimal connectivity in regions where public networks may be unreliable or unavailable, and its architecture ensures that data never leaves the site, providing low latency and high uptime, and making it easier to build redundancy, Vodacom says. With a facility like Sasol’s, it’s always mission-critical, so an onsite local network that offers secure and reliable connectivity and enables seamless communication is important, it adds.
“Our MPN solution provides a dedicated, secure and high-performance mobile network tailored to meet the specific needs of Sasol's operations. It delivers the scalability and reliability required to ensure continuity for its mission- and business-critical applications,” says Peter Malebye, managing executive at Vodacom Business.
“When all of this comes together, an organisation can ultimately bring in other innovations, such as digital twins, or enable remote and autonomous operations to improve planning,” adds Malebye.
For Victor Bester, Sasol executive VP of operations and projects, the collaboration is about leveraging technology to enhance processes that impact safety and efficiency across the company’s facilities.
“This initiative allows us to accelerate these efforts through improved connectivity and control of the mobile network deployed at our Secunda production facility. Our collaboration with Vodacom Business creates opportunities for us to do things differently and grow our digital maturity,” he notes.
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