AVEVA recently demonstrated 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 AVEVA PI World conference in Amsterdam.
“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. Business leaders face increased sustainability compliance requirements, retiring workforces, and the ever-present demand for efficiency, agility, and resilience. Raw data is not immediately useful or even understandable but when you analyse 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.
Data is being created at exponential rates, as the adoption of digital technologies has accelerated, and businesses seek to become more efficient. About 50% of existing industrial data as of June 2021 was created in the two preceding years, a Statista study showed.
Also, at AVEVA PI World, 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.
Fostering a more sustainable use of information
“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 minimise 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.
Inspiring customer stories at first in-person AVEVA PI World
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.
Throughout the event, customers, and partners from more than 70 companies in 12 industry verticals shared their experience of the data-led digital transformation.
Jan Broekman, VP Global Engineering & Smart Modularisation, at engineering company McDermott, offered insights into how digital solutions bring together the many different inputs required to build sustainable capital projects, from real-time commodity prices to low-carbon design across multiple locations.
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 1.3 million 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 $3.3 million in a single year and identified an additional $1.8 million in rebates, and optimized abatement measures.
Dr Catherine Green, Associate Professor at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University, explained how advanced technologies help improve human lives. Despite lockdowns and remote working, she and her team were able to develop and bring to market the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in eight months as compared to eight years before the outbreak of Covid-19, thanks to improved data collection, advanced analytics and distributed trials and manufacturing.
“The critical thing is 21st-century technology,” she said. “We really are at the transition point where you’re able to bring new tech to old problems. And data is going to change everything that we do here. It’s going to change our ability to analyse the problem, our ability to deliver the solution, and how we communicate with the healthcare sector and with the public.”