Intellectual Capital

Building a culture of innovation through R&D and collaboration

SRF drives business growth by integrating Research and Development (R&D) capabilities with its core business strategy to attain a competitive edge in the market. R&D is integral to the businesses as the Company focuses on developing customized and differentiated process technologies. The Company’s R&D investments and programs are directed towards meeting market demand and customer needs and help in delivering exceptional performance. Continuous development and re-engineering of products in collaboration with customers helps the Company to handle complex chemistries. The Company focuses on continuous improvement in current processes and developing innovative skill sets for new products and process development to enable faster growth and sustainability. This is coupled with advancements in digitalisation and automation to deliver greater value to all stakeholders on a continuous basis.

Dedicated R&D facility to enable Innovation

SRF’s Aspirations 2025 focuses on being an innovation driven Company, with R&D capabilities at the forefront for developing new technologies. To accomplish this, SRF has committed substantial effort, funds and other resources towards R&D activities and have set up five dedicated R&D centres located across Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.

The Company’s R&D facilities, engineering labs and pilot plant facilities are key to the Company’s growth. A qualified in-house R&D team focuses on developing new technologies that are used in manufacturing new chemicals and intermediates for agricultural and pharmaceutical customers, as well as variants of packaging films and technical textile products for different applications. The Company’s world-class product development centres are equipped with cutting-edge in-process and product testing facilities and technologies for analysis and product development. SRF engages and collaborates with premier research institutes, customers for joint process/ product development for accelerating innovation which further enables SRF to augment product stewardship and enhance customer experience.

A dedicated Chemicals Technology Group (CTG) comprising of more than 400 highly motivated researchers are involved in technology development, scaling up and commercialisation of new manufacturing facilities for the Chemicals Business. R&D capabilities are focused on continuous process improvement and developing efficient processes by exploring new chemistries and scaling them up for successful commercialisation. SRF also incorporates social and environment risks and concerns such as effective handling of by-product streams during process development and product manufacturing. The Company has been focusing on developing environmentally sustainable products with lower global warming potential (GWP), lower ODS potential, lower carbon footprint and sustainable hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) blends. SRF is the first Indian company to obtain the ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) certification for R-467A, a low GWP refrigerant blend for stationary air-conditioning application by in-house patented technology.

The R&D facility for Technical Textile Business includes pilot facilities for polymerization, spinning, twisting and dipping, enabling ideation and development of new products, and also raising internal technical capabilities for current products.

The R&D center for packaging business at Indore is fully equipped with a pilot polymerization plant, pilot printing, lamination and coating machine and other high-end analytical and testing equipment to simulate customer processes on a pilot scale, offering a key advantage to reduce concept-to-market cycle times. It has technology-driven credentials, globally harmonized quality systems and in-house resin manufacturing facilities, allowing upstream modifications and continuous improvements. Various new solutions have been developed in the areas of printability, enhanced performance, metallized and see-through barriers, aesthetics and industrial functionalities. Details of the R&D and innovation centers at SRF are listed in the Table 1.

Table 1: R&D and innovation centres

Over a period of time, SRF has made capital investments of more than INR 200 Crores towards establishing R&D facilities, with an annual expenditure of nearly INR 100 Crores. During the same period, the Company filed 36 patents, taking the cumulative total to 309. Out of this, 23 patents were granted this year. As on 31st March 2021, the Company has a total of 93 patents rights for its in-house products.

Advancing automation and digitalisation

SRF has embarked upon a digital transformation journey by leveraging new and innovative technologies aligned with the evolving business needs. The Company has been relentlessly working towards strategically investing in digital solutions and accelerating smooth digital transition. In the times of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the various digital interventions undertaken by SRF have significantly enhanced resilience and helped in developing a digitally empowered and agile workforce to deliver to its customers in an uninterrupted manner.

SRF has an integrated ERP platform for the integration of key applications for achieving high efficiency levels. The idea is to enhance operating effectiveness, while delivering greater value to the stakeholders, environment and society. In FY 2020-21, the Company undertook several initiatives that augmented automation of various processes. For instance, SRF undertook the replacement of paper with digital processes enabled with cloud drives to store digital documents, thereby reducing environmental footprint. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been implemented to improve product quality, as well as to reduce power consumption.

In its endeavor to leverage technology, SRF has developed and implemented the following modules for some of the business segments.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent measures imposed to limit physical interaction, SRF worked on accelerating the digital footprint across geographies and business processes, which enabled improvement in business efficiencies as well as helped reduce the carbon footprint. For instance, SRF has launched the Business Process Management (BPM) platform to convert manual processes into digital workflows, automated data analytics and exception reporting, thus enabling faster decision making.