Jhagadia, IN - Lighthouse award in Productivity

This is India's largest single-site caustic-soda commodity plant, where energy is not just a utility but a raw material, accounting for about 65% of total cost, and where low downstream integration and high geographic concentration leave little margin for error. When caustic prices and fuel costs turned against the site in 2023, intuition-led control rooms could no longer find the lowest-cost way to run 26 electrolysers, three captive power plants and a tightly coupled hydrogen network. The site rebuilt its IT/OT backbone in four months, stood up a 19-person digital centre of excellence, and embedded dozens of shop-floor solutions that range from physics-plus-machine-learning power optimisation to a generative-AI maintenance copilot and an agentic use-case factory that lets frontline engineers mine their own data. Through a 1.5x volume expansion and a generational workforce change, the plant lifted EBITDA margin by roughly 11 percentage points, cut power cost per tonne by 32% and material cost by about 15%, reduced hydrogen venting by 67% and lowered CO2 emissions by 14%, while upskilling 80% of its workforce.