Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, today announced its new EcoStruxure™ Plant Performance Advisors suite to help food and beverage; mining, minerals and metals; oil and gas; water and wastewater; and other industrial enterprises leverage their industrial automation data to increase operational profitability.
EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors, a specialized suite of smart manufacturing apps and digital services, provides data-driven manufacturers with easy to understand real-time analytics for prompt decision-making. The suite’s modular and scalable approach to implementation makes it cost-effective for plants to quickly turn the volumes of data they produce into the actionable insights they need to reach world class levels of operational efficiency, profitability and sustainability.
“The digital transformation vision is coming to life for industrial operations,” said Sophie Borgne, senior vice president, Schneider Electric Digital Plant. “Industry 4.0 has embraced digitalization but now must get out of ‘pilot purgatory’ and scale up. Respecting an industrial enterprise’s operational investment, the modular EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors make it easy for plants of all sizes, not just big corporations to modernize at a sustainable pace and accelerate their digital transformation in very simple, step by step manner.”
Data-driven Plant Performance Management
Blurring the line between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT), the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is producing unprecedented amounts of cloud-based, plant-wide and asset-level data. EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors collect, measure and analyze that information and recommend cost-effective actions to take for continuous improvement. Transformative business models, including asset optimization and asset performance management, predictive maintenance and real-time decision-making, drive efficiency and resilience in increasingly competitive industrial environments.
Schneider Electric is leading the way with digitalization in its own factories. Using cutting-edge technology, including EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors, its Smart Factory in Bantam, Indonesia is reporting a 44% reduction in machine downtime in one year. The Schneider Electric Smart Factory in Vaudreil, France also implemented EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors, which contributed to:
- 10% reduction in energy consumption.
- 25% improvement in plant operations efficiency.
- 20% reduction in maintenance costs.
- 20% reduction in diagnosis and repair time.
Modular, Scalable Asset and Plant Performance Management
EcoStruxure Plant Advisors are fully configurable, off-the-shelf solutions for easy integration into even the most advanced systems. By providing users with a familiar application theme and environment, an efficient plant can create synergies for processes and empower digital operators. This greatly reduces the user learning curve, saving time and money.
Schneider Electric’s modular and scalable EcoStruxure Plant Advisors suite includes:
- EcoStruxure Pumping Performance Advisor is a new digital service for the continuous improvement of water and wastewater pumping assets in 24/7 operations. By addressing challenges such as cost of water, plants can save up to 15% in OPEX through pump optimization.
- EcoStruxure Equipment Efficiency Advisor provides real-time efficiency root cause analysis. It then recommends appropriate action plans for increasing capacity while reducing unscheduled downtime and waste, which often results in an immediate 5% to 10% OEE gains.
- EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor uses augmented reality to slash the amount of time a worker spends looking for information to about a tenth of current levels. By superimposing real-time data and virtual objects (point of interest, documentation, procedures) onto cabinets or machines, this “contactless maintenance” model also increases safety. EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor V2.4 is easy to customize; no special platform knowledge is required. Users can also easily add augmented reality into existing procedures and export notes and analysis to share with others.
- EcoStruxure Secure Connect Advisor with embedded cybersecurity provides a digitally secure and simple asset monitoring connection for remote diagnostic and maintenance that reduces plant downtime while saving time and travel costs to maintain critical assets. In some cases, this has resulted in a shortened time to solution from over 7 days to as little as 4 hours.
