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Empowering the connected industrial economy

Peter Herweck, CEO AVEVA. (Image source: AVEVA)

The importance of contextualized as opposed to raw data, data sharing and empowering the connected worker were amongst the key themes highlighted at the AVEVA PI World conference held in Amsterdam from 16-19 May

AVEVA, a global leader in industrial software, showed how information ? contextualised industrial data ? is fundamental to sustainable growth across the energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure sectors while unveiling its product roadmap to industry leaders and partners at the event.

?Information-led innovation provides a proven and responsive pathway to industrial growth at a critical time when the business landscape has been reshaped by turbulence and risk. Industry is facing very complex challenges. Business leaders face increased sustainability compliance requirements, retiring workforces, and the ever-present demand for efficiency, agility and resilience. Raw data in itself is not immediately useful or even understandable but when you analyze and contextualise it into insightful information, that?s when you can help the industrial world to innovate at scale on the road to a net-zero future,? said AVEVA CEO Peter Herweck.

?When you talk about all this data, it is key to have the best visualisation available; that means giving the right information at the right time to the right person in the most reasonable way to generate action.? 

?It?s not only about technology, but also about changing business processes, and your facilities and clients? facilities, and helping people to utilise and get the best out of the technology,? he added. 

Amish Sabharwal, AVEVA executive vice president for Engineering, and Gregg Le Blanc, AVEVA senior vice-president, Information Management, outlined the company?s integrated portfolio and elaborated on the product roadmap for 2022 and beyond. 

Data sharing

Le Blanc highlighted the importance of data sharing and the connected industrial economy, through ?being able to activate, transform that data into information and share it securely with others. Using the data in that way unlocks different capabilities that can drive new insights. Our software can help you have a transformational impact on how you use data, turn it into information and get those insights. And you can optimise your entire value chain around that. 

 ?Approximately 68% of currently available enterprise data goes unused because it sits in organisational silos, yet more data is being created than ever before. AVEVA software enables data to be aggregated, transformed and shared within companies and with external partners, unlocking innovation at scale for all players within a new and connected industrial economy,? Le Blanc said. AVEVA Data Hub, a SaaS solution that was launched earlier this year on AVEVA Connect, the industrial cloud platform, provides data sharing capabilities enabling businesses to unlock operational efficiencies, increase sustainability, and drive digital transformation.

Sabharwal explained how the digital twin helps embed sustainability across industrial enterprises. ?The digital twin recreates a physical asset in digital form by capturing, organising and contextualising data in a quantifiable form. When these models are used to forecast future scenarios, they can predict potential problems and improve asset reliability, reducing costs and resource use, and minimize carbon emissions. AVEVA?s digital twin is uniquely able to capture engineering, operations and maintenance data to provide a holistic, integrated view across multiple use cases,? Sabharwal said.

AVEVA recently further strengthened its digital twin software with a host of new features that make visualising asset information with real-time data faster and easier than ever. With AVEVA Point Cloud Manager and AVEVA Asset Information Management, as well as new 3D wearable scanning and advanced document management, AVEVA customers can now experience a complete digital twin within just 60 days.

More than 1,500 delegates from around the world attended the four-day event in person, while an estimated 1,000 others interacted online. They were given an overview of new developments with industry-leading solutions including AVEVA Connect industrial cloud platform and AVEVA PI System operations information management. Learning labs offered hands-on technical practice in cloud and data environments.

Use cases

Throughout the event, customers and partners from more than 70 companies in 12 industry verticals shared their experience of the data-led digital transformation, and how it is helping them to tackle the complex challenges of the current industrial landscape.

Sergio Valencia, ROPI technical services manager at EDP Renewables, shared lessons from a Lighthouse Program project where two million data streams from disparate wind farms were streamed to the cloud for centralised insights.

Jacky Wright, chief digital officer of Microsoft, talked about how data accelerates sustainability progress. ?A cloud-based, data-driven approach enabled us to assess, select and build new technologies, and reduce our scope 1, scope 2, and, ultimately, scope 3 emissions across our business,? she said at the Digital Agility and Resilience Panel. She explained how data analytics has supported smart buildings, investment into renewable energy to power data centres, and driven strategic decisions to pay for the removal of 1.3mn metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

Michael Dean, global director - Power, Controls & Information System at Kellogg?s shared how the company?s platform investment has paid off in terms of scale, consistency, standardisation and collaboration. Installing AVEVA PI System helped Kellogg to leverage, analyse and manage energy data in its factories, creating a digital ecosystem that benchmarked usage and identified opportunities for savings. As a result, Kellogg saved US$3.3mn in a single year and identified an additional US$1.8mn in rebates, and optimised abatement measures.