Schneider Electric Delivers Multiple Product Announcements from Its Innovation Summit: Software Conference 2017

Schneider Electric Helps Digital Transformation in Food & Beverage with New Industry Solutions
Schneider Electric announced three new Food and Beverage manufacturing solutions as part of the company’s ongoing effort to help increase operational excellence, efficiency and performance while enabling regulatory and food safety compliance.

Food and Beverage and Consumer Packaged Goods manufacturers face a number of challenges, which are potentially impacting profitability. Growing environmental and sustainability related regulations are resulting in higher energy costs. Product yields must continually be improved to meet an increasingly diverse set of consumer demands. Each of these industry challenges must be addressed while maintaining product quality and safety standards to avoid product recalls and ensure continued consumer trust and confidence.

Three new industry solutions from Schneider Electric can help manufacturers to address these challenges:

• Energy Performance – provides improved visibility into energy usage, enabling opportunities to help reduce consumption and costs

• Advanced Process Control (APC) – allows manufacturers to help improve yield and product quality by minimizing unpredictable variations in the drying process

• Label Assurance – helps to ensure compliance through 100% label inspection checks and to reduce recalls

   

These solutions help Food and Beverage manufacturers to simultaneously further improve efficiency, quality and performance by delivering additional; real-time visibility, control and intelligence across operations and functional areas.

Label Assurance
This solution inspects and validates packaging labels against their intended SKU at the packaging line level, helping to reduce the risk of product recalls due to mislabeling and undeclared allergens. With Label Assurance, manufacturers perform automated 100% label checks. The solution updates the scanned data back to the work order, providing labeling performance reports in real-time. This allows engineers to help perform continuous improvement analytics, which can save time by not having to comb through vast amounts of raw data.

Energy Performance
Energy Performance for manufacturing converts data from disparate sources into actionable intelligence to help optimize energy management and consumption while furthering sustainability initiatives. Lowering energy consumption through contextualized data-driven insights, can be acted upon to more quickly identify energy efficiency gaps for more improved efficiency and profitability. With real-time monitoring of power network quality and reliability, root cause analysis can be performed and electrical issues can be identified before possibly damaging electrical equipment, which can result in unplanned production stoppages.

Advanced Process Control (APC)
Designed for multivariate processes such as evaporation and spray drying, APC helps to improve production yield and quality. Automatic, predictive and closed loop control helps to ensure the process is producing at a more optimum level based on real-time readings of variables, thereby further maximizing profits. For example, a large global diary company deployed APC across their production facilities for spray dryer optimization and achieved a 10 percent increase in throughput and an 8 percent reduction in energy consumption with zero product quality violations.

Schneider Electric Expands Manufacturing Operations Management Offering for Mining Industry
Schneider Electric announced enhancements to its Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solution for the Mining industry. This initiative can help optimize the mining supply chain, drive efficiency and further maximize utilization of operating assets, which can result in better profitability.

Schneider Electric offers Mining organizations an opportunity to further digitally transform their operations with more accurate, real-time visibility to information across production, inventory and quality management processes. Miners can automatically log inputs and outputs of the plant in real-time, including materials, consumables, energy, waste and emissions output.

This data, when made available to domain-specific decision support tools and integrated with supply chain and enterprise resource planning systems, provides new levels of intelligence to help drive continuous improvement. Eliminating manually entered production values while breaking down pervasive operational data silos can help minimize time, errors and costs associated with manual and duplicate data-entry, further enhancing agility and efficiency.

Mining organizations implementing Ampla Mining Operations Management as part of their Schneider Electric solution can potentially benefit from the EcoStruxure architecture, resulting in better process and data integration across their organization. What results is vertical integration from sensors to edge control to software / analytics at the same time as end-to-end integration across the value chain and help breaking down data silos. This approach helps to increase efficiency, removes value leaks and increase profitability.

Select improvements of Schneider Electric Software’s MOM solution for the Mining industry include:

• User selectable point in time feature for ‘Inventory data reprocessing’

• Data reprocessing has improved performance by 4 times according to Schneider Electric

• New “Calculated Inventory” feature to help define custom calculations on captured inventory data

• Ampla Planner, Gantt Chart usability and user experience enhancements

• Client response times has improved performance by 2 times according to Schneider Electric

• Wonderware Online InSight connectivity

   

   

Schneider Electric Extends Subscription Access Across Industrial Software Portfolio
Schneider Electric announced an expansion of the company’s subscription license model – Subscription Access – that includes access to more industrial software applications. Customers choosing this offering can see reduced upfront costs, easier license fee management, access to exclusive products, bundled capabilities and can result in a lower total cost of ownership. Subscription Access is now available when purchasing Engineering, Planning, Operations and Asset Performance, as well as Control and Information software solutions.

Schneider Electric is an adopter of the subscription-based model for industrial software. Using an à la carte approach, Subscription Access can give buyers greater flexibility to choose the software applications and scale that is required. Future software licenses can be added to an existing agreement, which can simplify how new functionality or users are added or removed. Upfront costs are replaced with annual payments spread over the term of the agreement. As a result, capital expenditures are replaced with ongoing operating expenses, which can help better align cost to value while often easing approval processes for Operations Technology (OT) purchases.

Schneider Electric Expands Cloud Platform with New Performance Module
Schneider Electric announced the continued expansion of its cloud platform, Insight, powered by Wonderware Online. A new Insight Performance module provides Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) monitoring, asset utilization analysis and downtime tracking in the cloud.

Insight Performance provides operators with data-driven KPIs and real-time visibility into equipment performance. Built-in analysis capabilities help to enable cross-plant equipment benchmarking that can deliver actionable intelligence to more effectively increase equipment performance and operating efficiency. With greater access to key metrics, users can more quickly identify and share best practices to help drive process and production improvements across their business.

This Software as a Service (SaaS) offering can potentially accelerate time-to-value through more rapid provisioning and application configuration while helping to reduce on-premise infrastructure and total cost of ownership. This solution offers the following capabilities:

• Lighter-weight applications that can be easier to install, configure and maintain

• Virtually no on-premises servers or hardware requirement, which ca reduce cost and complexity

   

The cloud deployment model leverages conventional or IoT edge devices to collect operational data, sending information directly to a hosted online environment, bypassing the usual layers securely. Following this model, Insight Performance provides opportunities for facilities with semi-automated or manual operations to help expand their footprint and achieve improved results.