Aveva demonstrates data’s key role in sustainable industrial growth

Aveva, an industrial software company, demonstrated how information – contextualised industrial data – is critical to long-term growth in 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 in itself 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.

Amish Sabharwal, Aveva’s executive vice president of engineering, and Gregg Le Blanc, Aveva’s senior vice president of information management, also spoke at the event on the company’s integrated portfolio and product plan for 2022 and beyond.

Fostering a more sustainable use of information
“Approximately 68 per cent 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, its customers can now experience a complete digital twin within just 60 days.

Read: Aveva launches enhanced digital twin with wearable scanning

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  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 and 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 centers, and driven strategic decisions to pay for the removal of 1.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

#Digitaltransformation panel between top industry experts – listen in on the Digital Agility & Resilience panel, by @SophieBorgne , @SchneiderElec , Damien O'Connor, @TQS_Integration , @WrightJacky , @Microsoft , & @PHerweck , AVEVA. Listen now: https://t.co/TeCFXOLlYK #APW2022 pic.twitter.com/X9XaiH0MKu

— AVEVA (@AVEVAGroup) May 17, 2022

Michael Dean, global director – Power, Controls and 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 $3.3m in a single year and identified an additional $1.8m in rebates, and optimised abatement measures.

Watch Michael Dean, Global Director – Power, Controls & Information System at Kellogg, share Kellogg's #digitaltransformation vision and how #AVEVA has empowered its operations at AVEVA PI World Amsterdam now! https://t.co/fzISal3us7 pic.twitter.com/BVOVBZJpdI

— AVEVA (@AVEVAGroup) May 17, 2022

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.

A data-led approach of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine & the Race Against the Virus. Caspar Herzberg, CRO, AVEVA, & Dr. Catherine Green, Associate Professor in Chromosome Dynamics, @UniofOxford speak on how #technology empowered her team. Watch now: https://t.co/mEwkP0y8Bw pic.twitter.com/JAAsfGXGpv

— AVEVA (@AVEVAGroup) May 17, 2022

“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.”