Transforming the Enterprise with Connected Data and Operational Intelligence

Summary
OSIsoft once again held its annual Users Conference in San Francisco, California. The conference theme "Operational Intelligence," revealed how companies share data across the enterprise and turn these data into applications that produce valuable operational intelligence. The conference focused on the connected enterprise, data sharing, collaboration, and operational intelligence.

This was the 26th year that the company held the event, which attracted over 2,000 people from 45 different countries. There were over 65 industry end user presentations about how companies use the PI System in novel ways to create business value. Twenty-seven OSIsoft partners also exhibited their solutions in the partner exposition.

Key takeaways include:

• Clients are turning data into operational intelligence and transforming their world.
• OSIsoft is working with business partners such as Microsoft and SAP to help solve information technology/operational technology (IT/OT) convergence.
• Clients are using the technology in the cloud and in datacenters.
• Clients have used the technology to develop innovative business solutions that extract business value from data.

Transforming the World with Data
According to Martin Otterson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at OSIsoft, "Big Data and IoT are helping converge the operations and IT worlds to drive business. Companies are connecting data directly from sensors or other assets such as SCADA, HMI, PLC, DCS, and IT; sharing that data; and performing analytics so the right intelligence is available to the right people at the right time."

Mr. Otterson believes that the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud are fueling the growth in Big Data, which must be converted into intelligence to support timely decisions. This is driving OSIsoft's market penetration. By transforming manufacturing, materials, machines, products, and utilities in a world where everything is getting smarter and connected, the technology will enable companies to obtain operational intelligence in real-time.

According to Mr. Otterson, "The PI System has been collecting data from control systems for over 30 years. With new sensors and the IT/OT convergence, the PI System is able to combine operational and business information."

Engineers can solve problems by sharing data and using the context to describe the data.

Connected Cows Improve Productivity
Joseph Sirosh, Corporate VP, Microsoft, discussed how OSIsoft and Microsoft are working together to connect Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). He described how the convergence of the IT and OT worlds are driving OSIsoft's business, and how Microsoft is leveraging PI Cloud Connect and analytics in datacenters to directly connect to sensor data. By integrating data with business systems, operations can bring value to IoT. PI Cloud Connect is being used to collect data from all kinds of assets – sensors and systems such as SCADA, DCS, PLCs, HMI, etc. When combined with analytics, these business and operational data can provide valuable insights.

Mr. Sirosh provided an example of how the connected cloud, Big Data, and IoT are transforming one of the world's oldest industries – dairy farms. He explained that dairy farmers in Japan have done so to maximize calf production.

The number of steps that a cow takes correlates to estrus, an indicator of when the cow is in heat. The Fujitsu Kyushu Systems cow step system, which runs on Microsoft Azure, was designed to count and correlate these steps.

By putting pedometer sensors on cows and connecting the sensor data to the cloud, the farmer can determine how many steps the cows take to help detect estrus. The sensor data is transmitted to the Microsoft PI System-based Azure solution. When the cow's steps increase substantially this indicates that the cow is fertile. And because the cow is only fertile for 12 to 18 hours every 21 days, the information can help the farmer increase pregnancy rates and improve calf production rates.

Fujitsu ran experiments and found that the solution helped increase calf production by 12 percent and provided other benefits (such as helping to detect diseased cows), generating approximately $10 million dollars per farm in economic benefits on average. This example illustrates how connected data, IoT, analytics, and the connected cloud bring value to industry. Without the power of the cloud, it would have been nearly impossible to maintain the data.

Solving Real Business Problems Using OSIsoft and SAP
Mr. Nils Hertzberg, Sr. VP of IoT, SAP, discussed SAP's partnership with OSIsoft and the business strategy to solve business problems through actionable operational intelligence. By bringing together the organization that pays for things (finance) with the organization that makes the money (operations) through IT/OT convergence, industrial organizations can drive actionable results. OSIsoft and SAP are working together to analyze and process data business and operational date in real-time.

SAP and OSIsoft are working on two new products that will be available in the fall:

• PI Integrator for SAP HANA where the integrator will be able to extract data from assets in real-time.
• PI Integrator for SAP HANA Cloud Platform for on premise cloud and off premise cloud.

Journey to Operational Intelligence
Norton Green, Director, Executive Briefing Program at OSIsoft shared how the company is handling its own journey to operational excellence. OSIsoft has seen tremendous growth over the past ten years. It has doubled its headcount and doubled its number of offices; resulting in a 300 percent increase in IT assets needed to handle its increased data requirements. The company now has six petabytes of data (the equivalent of seven years of HD TV) stored on hard drives. The goal is to empower employees with more visibility into critical IT assets to increase productivity using solutions built on its own software tools. These include:

• Monitoring and alerting using a centralized PI Server to implement dashboards and tags
• Extending data collection to the enterprise to make improvements using dashboards, tags, and troubleshooting for everything from facilities to business operations
• Extending service-level monitoring and predictive capabilities for the overall health of the services delivered to OSIsoft clients

The company is also transitioning from an on-premise to cloud organization via Microsoft Azure using the PI System infrastructure already in place to provide flexibility, speed, and efficiency.

PI Coresight dashboards give details about the company's data centers, information about all departments, and about acceptable CPU and machine usage. Mr. Green demonstrated this capability showing OSIsoft's main IT dashboards, which – among other insights – provide visibility into which resources are underutilized. As a result, the company can reallocate resources and make appropriate improvements.

Barrick Gold's Business Case for Operational Excellence
Ian Allen, Senior Manager, Mining Information Technology at Barrick Gold described the process the company used to make a business case to justify and get approval for an unbudgeted OSIsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) at the end of an austere fiscal year. Barrick Gold has been an OSIsoft customer since 1998, with ten PI Servers and about 146,000 tags.

Mr. Allen explained that the gold mining business is going through a difficult time due to higher costs for exploration, declines in gold prices, and tight margins. This made it challenging to justify the (unbudgeted) capital expense for an EA agreement, especially since the company was then cutting costs, budgets, and jobs.

Gold prices have decreased substantially over the past couple of years, and the company is spending more to find fewer ounces of this precious metal. While Barrick Gold is number one in reserves, number one in production, and number two in market capitalization, the stock is down due to market conditions. The company's goal is to be the number one in market capitalization again and it believes the PI System will help increase profitability to make that possible. "We can't control the price of gold, but we can control production and discovery costs and that is where the PI System will help us improve operational intelligence," Mr. Allen stated.

While data are available, since the company's various sites do not share a common infrastructure, it was not easy to get the information needed to improve production. The company believes that the new EA with OSIsoft will bring savings through better energy and water management, process plant optimization, and the ability to get information to the right people on mobile equipment and smart devices. With the EA, the company now has unlimited access to tags, PI System monitoring through the NOC, and access to OSIsoft experts in the Center of Excellence.

Vision for the Future
Dr. Patrick Kennedy, OSIsoft's founder, discussed how companies cannot control things without being able to measure them. "The scope of the PI System is changing with the technology. OSIsoft is using the PI System to change how clients interact with their computers and changing the world." Dr. Kennedy's vision for the things that will change the world include:  

• The PI System will enable clients to connect with their own customers, suppliers, and partners through an enterprise system that sits on a network and works with products that connect securely and privately through the cloud.
•  Users can expect more enhancements, changes, and improvements to the PI System. The software will integrate future data and be even faster to accommodate new technologies. Improvements will include the ability to respond to bigger and faster data.
• The data should be able to be mapped to other innovative technologies.

According to OSIsoft's Mr. Otterson, "The technology includes the past, present, and future insights for the journey to operational intelligence. It is important to share operations data with other types of data – whether with ESRI mapping data or data from SAP or Microsoft in the business world."

He encouraged users to partner with others in their organization to help realize the value of the PI System to solve problems. Armed with the right data, people can impact their companies to help transform their world. OSIsoft's message to users was to apply the PI System to create new actionable operational intelligence by looking at data in a different way and leveraging that information. Users should expand their use of the PI System to other users and organizations for additional value.

The OSIsoft 2015 Users Conference provided an immense amount of information about how users are transforming their enterprises by deploying the PI System to connect and share data and derive business value. Users are connecting data in the cloud from data centers. The IT and OT worlds are converging with data from each world that enables better data-driven decision from timely, actionable, in-context intelligence. For more information, OSIsoft has posted conference presentations on its website.

The conference included a memorable, thought-provoking keynote presentation by NASA astronaut Jim Lovell and Flight Control Director Gene Kranz from the legendary Apollo 13 mission where it was mission-critical to get the right operational intelligence. As we learned during the conference, worlds will converge when you combine and analyze data between the operations and business world. As with NASA Mission Control, when it comes to data and intelligence in a real-time environment, security and reliability are paramount and "failure is not an option."

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Keywords: Connected Infrastructure; Big Data, Connected Data, IoT, Industrial IoT, Smart Manufacturing, Manufacturing Intelligence, OSIsoft, PI System, ARC Advisory Group.