In the past few months we have seen the true value of resilient systems. And we believe that digitisation is a way to resilience with remote monitoring, predictive and preventive maintenance, and remote operations all leading to ensuring productivity. With AVEVA as Schneider’s software partner, customers can access deep technical expertise and realise productivity transformation. Craig Hayman, CEO AVEVA and Peter Herweck, EVP Industry, Schneider Electric/Vice Chairman, AVEVA explain more and show how some customers are using digitisation to support the evolution of the marketplace.
Q: In today’s new reality, productivity is the top priority for manufacturing industries, how are you seeing customers’ needs changing?
Peter Herweck: In these disrupted times, we’re proud to help our customers to drive factory productivity gains through automation. The current crisis has shown that large areas of manufacturing companies have not yet experienced true productivity improvements other than on the shop floor. Many of our C-level customers are convinced that a step function in productivity can be generated through digitisation of work processes and they are now becoming more important than ever.
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Digitisation is enabling accelerated acquisition of data and big data analysis, enabling our customers to envision non-traditional approaches for driving productivity of both their people and physical assets. Now, the push is on for digitisation to permeate their organisations from shop floor to the top floor. But in order to implement such changes, customers require solutions that furnish the desired data, create the transparency required paired with in depth process knowledge to drive up production output volumes.
Craig Hayman: Industries today are under pressure to operate more efficiently, often leveraging remote workers. However, although it’s quick to click-in your first implementation, transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey that takes time, especially since it is not just the technology, but a cultural shift. And our customers want guidance on how to optimally take that journey. And Schneider Electric and AVEVA are committed partners in this process. We see our role as providing them with the insights, information and tools they need to detect the emerging data patterns that will drive their productivity gains. With a complete range of open, system-agnostic technologies and flexible subscription options, we can help them with an approach tailored to their individual requirements and built on their existing automation investments. This really allows them to accelerate their return on investment and maximise productivity gains.
We have seen how effective this can be firsthand through the Schneider Electric’s internal global Smart Factory initiative to digitise over 80 production factories across the globe. These technologies are resulting in increased overall equipment effectiveness, better energy management, predictive maintenance, and augmented operations for training and repair.
Q: For those customers of yours that have deployed digital solutions, what kinds of benefits are they seeing?
Peter Herweck: For many of our customers, large improvements in time-to-market have been achieved. For example, we recently helped a food producer modernise and digitise an aging sugar mill. With outdated software and hardware, the plant was experiencing between 33 and 40 blackouts per 39-week season. This caused unacceptable production downtime, affecting the plant’s output and product quality. In developing a solution that offered greater visibility into the plant’s operations, they were able to reduce downtime, and achieve a 20 percent increase in throughput.
Craig Hayman: A beautiful thing happens when you enable your customer to easily access infrastructure data anywhere and add analytics on top of it. That’s when the people aspect of digital transformation begins. Once the team sees the data, they rapidly adopt a different approach. Now they ask, “How do I get higher productivity solutions out of this environment?” They no longer only want to improve their tasks. They want to change how they work to access new value.
Brazil’s Granada Farmacias needed to integrate its two product lines while tailoring the content of each batch and ensuring consistent, high-quality production. Using Schneider Electric’s Ecostruxure solution combined with AVEVA Historian software, the team achieved up to 15 percent increase in productivity, through unifying IT and OT in an open and flexible architecture. IT manager Tatiana Stoeterau said, “Since the implementation, we have increased our efficiency, improved the quality of our products and we have also been able to trace any stage of the process.”
In the OT market, floating data out of the IT environment into scalable edge capabilities in the cloud, means data can flow more quickly around the operational environment, and the value chain as a whole. This demands robust security and control systems to leverage the full scale of the edge-to-enterprise cloud – that’s the power that the AVEVA Schneider Electric partnership brings, because we can quickly bring this to life for our customers.
Learn more during our upcoming digital events AVEVA World Digital and Schneider Electric A Way Forward for Industry about how we can jumpstart your digitisation projects and drive agility in unprecedented times of change.
Article by Peter Herweck, Executive VP, Industrial Automation and Member of the Executive Committee, Schneider Electric and co-authored with Craig Hayman, CEO AVEVA.
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