Rebecca Gibson |
Kim Custeau, senior vice president of asset performance management and manufacturing execution systems at AVEVA, explains why performance intelligence will be critical in a post-pandemic industrial world that demands organisations develop a high level of agility, sustainability and resilience.
Why is performance intelligence a critical focus today?
The global big data and analytics market is growing at lightening pace and projected to be worth $274 billion by 2022. Staying ahead of the curve requires a new understanding of the scope and scale of industrial information to leverage that data effectively. Insight into industrial information from edge to enterprise reduces downtime, production costs and energy consumption, allowing organisations to optimise resources and drive sustainability. By boosting performance intelligence, we can reimagine data and inspire better understanding of complex value chains, to improve performance and drive efficiency.
How is AVEVA leading innovation in performance intelligence software?
AVEVA joined forces with OSIsoft in March 2021 to enable it to meet the expanding information management needs of industrial companies and accelerate their digital transformation. The combined portfolio brings OSIsoft’s data management together with AVEVA’s industrial software to unlock performance intelligence.
Providing greater operational agility and resilience, performance intelligence connects information and artificial intelligence (AI) with human insight, to enable faster and more accurate decision-making, helping industries boost sustainability. Performance intelligence gives the people behind essential processes the rich, reliable data they need to better measure and understand the entire industrial life cycle. Areas where performance intelligence is likely to have the most impact will include organisational productivity, operational agility and sustainability.
In what way is Microsoft integral to AVEVA’s performance intelligence solutions?
By combining Microsoft’s deep technology stack for the cloud and AVEVA’s industry-specific expertise, we help businesses to capitalise on the power of technology to become more resilient, sustainable, agile and competitive. Microsoft and AVEVA’s combined strengths are fuelling innovative breakthrough capabilities.
Working side-by-side with Microsoft, AVEVA has templated its best practices and vertical solutions to become repeatable, scalable and adaptable, thereby enabling fast implementation and payback. Today, organisations deploying the combined AVEVA Energy Management and Performance solutions can reduce project implementation times by up to 60 per cent, when compared to bespoke implementations of intelligent operations.
Can you tell us about AVEVA’s newly extended industrial cloud offer?
In April, we announced new capabilities for the AVEVA Insight cloud solution. The enhanced offering delivers a powerful platform for operational excellence where users of all levels of experience can now leverage the power of AI in the cloud. This advancement enables industrial companies to deploy fit-for-purpose analytics at scale and institutionalise outcomes within their end-to-end operational processes.
AVEVA is redefining the predictive analytics market through the intersection of AI and human insights. Combining intelligence with the digital twin enables customers to maximise profitability and drive risk out of their operations, while reducing downtime by up to 25 per cent and maintenance costs by 30 per cent.
AVEVA Insight now delivers self-service anomaly detection, with no programming required. It also enables more comprehensive analytics for in-depth analysis of operations and maintenance processes so that customers can take advantage of prescriptive actions, AI and machine learning across the enterprise. This enables distributed teams to collaborate with a single source of truth across the operational landscape to optimise performance.
What are the new features of the open platform?
The open platform consolidates and enriches data from multiple sources for greater visibility and improved decision-making and eases the transition from on-premises to cloud. New capabilities include expanded predictive analytics algorithms, pre-packaged asset libraries, enhanced reporting, enterprise asset management interface and production line modelling that enable the workforce to accelerate time to value and ensure safe and efficient execution of work.
How has the pandemic evolved the software needs of industrial firms?
The business drivers for digital transformation have evolved considerably since the onset of the pandemic. With remote teams requiring better context to supervise operations, collaborate and make decisions, there is a heightened need for better visualisation and contextual analysis of operating information across the enterprise. Cloud, industrial internet of things, AI and data analytics will drive real-time business outcomes such as efficiency, availability, sustainability and profitability.
The implementation of AI and machine learning in industrial operations alone will not transform businesses, so it is imperative that enterprises empower their people to help drive operational improvements in reliability, availability, consistency and sustainability. The connected workforce is now becoming the agent of change. As operations become more autonomous, it’s vital to ensure the reliability and safe operation of critical assets with minimal supervision.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2021 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.