Open automation enables sustainable & resilient industry future.
New Zealand’s economy, sustainability, business resilience and achievement of difficult climate change goals can all be boosted if industrial software, industrial sustainability technology, and universal automation are adopted in a bigger way by the industrial sector.
Although it may seem like a big claim, the proof is already out there. Schneider Electric (SE), a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, is already integrating this into industrial concerns to great effect – enabling what we call ‘Industries Of The Future’.
What we’ve seen is this: some organisations are advancing on their industrial sustainability goals through a close integration of software, automation, and energy. They have converged process performance and electrical power consumption into a single overview – and are experiencing, on average, reductions of 20 per cent in capital expenditure, 15 per cent in downtime, 7-12 per cent in their carbon footprint, and 10 per cent in energy usage, as well as a 3 per cent increase in profitability.
But let’s take a step back and look first at the issues facing industry – by whom we mean manufacturers, food and beverage, water and waste water, mining, energy, chemicals, and renewables.
Industry faces a double-edged sword. On one hand, it contributes to the world economy through profit generation and productivity improvement. While leading economic development, it also has a big responsibility to support the environment and society. The industrial sector is the number one contributor to global CO2 emissions: 30 per cent in total, with 6 per cent direct and 24 per cent indirect emissions.
Achieving sustainable operations is one of the most important challenges the industrial world has ever faced. Industry is poised to have the greatest impact on mitigating climate change and other sustainability problems.
Energy, automation, and software are the recipe, and many industrial enterprises are already proving that investing in sustainable operations advances business success. IDC research shows industrial companies that pursue sustainability strategically – combined with a long-term, funded, and committed digital transformation agenda – considerably out-perform competitors.
This investment in digital transformation is fuelling a digital upsurge. The way goods and services are procured, produced, delivered, and consumed is increasingly driven by information technology and software. More work is done remotely. More interactions are digital. More operations are automated.
All this is leading to an exponential growth in available data needing to be properly utilised through integration into the control system or automation environment, so we can move from actionable insights to realising improvements in operations and productivity.
Technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT) holds great promise. However, its potential is being limited by the closed proprietary nature of existing automation systems, which make it difficult to integrate with third-party components and are expensive to upgrade and maintain.
So automation systems need to evolve from their closed, proprietary, and largely hardware-driven context to one where data and software play starring roles. If we can do this, then automation will not only enable, it will also boost industrial digital transformation.
Next generation automation systems must follow the principles of portability (so engineering efficiencies can be realised), interoperability (enabling easy connectivity and communication with third party systems), software-centricity (fully decoupled from underlying hardware) and, importantly, openness. If this occurs, then we can tap into the best available technology from the IT world and converge it with industrial automation. We call this state ‘universal automation’.
Industrial automation suppliers need to help accelerate the automation towards this new open approach; we recognise we can’t do this alone. That’s where UniversalAutomation.org (UAO) comes in.
In order to jump start the future, Schneider Electric partnered with other industrial leaders and pioneers to found UniversalAutomation.org, an independent not-for-profit association managing the reference implementation of an industrial automation shared source runtime.
With an open automation platform, industry can share ideas and advancements, drive the pace of innovation and bring about the sort of sustainability transformation the world is looking for. It will help companies address change and use the large volume of available data – and make a huge difference to the way we do things.
Only 26 per cent of industrial companies are successfully reaping the rewards of digital transformation at scale, and more than 70 per cent of digital transformation projects either fail or don’t achieve full value. So we know more needs to be done to see the full benefit of this in industry.
Companies that re-invent themselves digitally thrive; those that stagnate perish. Harvard Business Review found that since 2000, 52 per cent of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist as a result of digital disruption.
Industrial companies embracing smart operations driven by the industrial software and open automation technology are experiencing step-change advancements we could only dream of a decade ago. They are the ones better positioned to prosper among the industries of the future.
Beyond automation, ‘Industries Of The Future’ is about ensuring we don’t make trade-offs between planet, people and profit. With technology and purpose, we can ensure future industries are able to sustain all three.
Schneider Electric has over 20,000 specialists around the world who create applications, develop systems, and deliver projects to support operations across their complete lifecycles. We help our customers leverage software-centric automation through EcoStruxure™, our IoT-enabled, open architecture and platform for industrial automation and energy management, our strong agnostic software portfolio that includes modular IIoT applications, and our partnerships with world-leading independent software companies, including our strategic partner AVEVA, and UniversalAutomation.org.
For more information: se.com/nz/en/work/campaign/industries-of-the-future/