For EDF Renewable Energy the SAP Systems Will Consume the OT Data

In my last blog "Moving Beyond the Process Historian: IT Platforms Consume OT Data Entirely", I described the shift in how industrial organizations are thinking about platforms for big data and analytics. The article describes business perspective from an IT-OT data integration perspective and shifting how companies will build platforms that are designed to help operations become more connected and build more predictive and proactive work processes. One company EDF Renewable Energy has decided to use SAP to consume operational data from the OT systems at the sites.

Devang Shah, Senior Manager of Database and Business Intelligence at US-based EDF Renewable Energy (part of the EDF Group in France) filled ARC in on the company’s journey to transform operations and maintenance using predictive analytics. As one of the largest renewable energy producers in North America, EDF RE needed to optimize operations and maintenance at more than 100 wind and solar farms.

While already an SAP user, the company did not yet have an enterprise data platform.  After researching the market, it chose SAP HANA as a common data warehouse platform to easily integrate and get access to a variety of sensor, geospatial, and ERP data to support analytics.  The goal was to develop a delivery platform for analytics that business users and IT groups alike could leverage via self-serve.

EDF RE already had a good understanding of industrial analytics, including the benefits of consuming not only streaming data from the field but also the entire history of field sensor data.  However, much of the company operational data resided in OSIsoft PI servers, which initially represented an integration challenge.

The timing of the collaboration between SAP and OSIsoft allowed EDF Renewable Energy to capitalize on the technology partnership. Mr. Shah mentioned that he believes this partnership and creation of the OSIsoft-SAP Connector technology benefited both companies, as well as end users like EDF RE.  The connector made it easy to integrate real-time data collected from the field into its enterprise platform.  This includes time-series data from field sensors associated with the company’s wind turbine assets.  The company considered other methods, but determined that these were not native to both OSIsoft and SAP, and thus unsustainable.  The IoT connector tool enabled the continued use of the OSIsoft framework for data cleansing and aggregation, a critical aspect of any data analytics strategy.

EDF RE plans to leverage predictive analytics applications now that a platform is complete. The future will involve operational and predictive analytics, looking to data patterns and machine learning to predict the frequency of failures and identify information about different assets to predict production.  Significantly, users can develop and employ their own analytics, without necessarily having to go to engineering or IT for support.