Here’s how Aveva is unlocking the value of industrial data

Globally, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a profound shift in how organisations develop, invest, and deploy technologies to meet their net-zero climate commitments. Companies must consume less energy and use it more efficiently to reduce carbon emissions. Although this sounds easy, we all know it’s difficult, especially if there is no correct data. Today’s digital technologies, data, and artificial intelligence have the power to accelerate businesses’ sustainability transformation. Aveva has played a central role in helping companies develop energy-related roadmaps and solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while still meeting the world’s energy demands.

“The technology sector presents opportunities because we can deploy at scale and connect different companies and different operations through data, which then opens up new insights that can be used to solve sustainability challenges. For example, to address the current climate crisis, we must implement technology that we already have while also innovating to develop new solutions to help reach the internationally agreed goals,” said Lisa Wee, vice president – Sustainability at Aveva.

Aveva PI World
At the recently held Aveva PI World Amsterdam 2022, the company demonstrated how contextualised data is an essential component to sustainable growth in sectors such as power, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Focusing on primarily creating a space for customers and partners to share how they are transforming their organisations and industries, the four-day event, which took place from May 16-19, 2022, gave an overview of the new developments and solutions. Furthermore, the learning labs offered hands-on technical practice in cloud and data environments.

In the keynote speech, Peter Herweck, chief executive officer of Aveva, discussed how the company’s information-led innovation provides a proven and flexible path to industrial growth at a critical time when the business landscape has been reshaped by turbulence and risk. “Industries are facing complex challenges in a turbulent market environment. 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.”

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), industries have committed to dramatically reducing emissions in the next 25 years. With digitalisation driving sustainability, Aveva aims to help accelerate the organisations to reach their goals. “We spark industrial ingenuity by connecting people with trusted information and insights and also help drive responsible use of the world’s resources,” he added.

Fostering sustainable use of data
The event also witnessed Amish Sabharwal, executive vice president of Engineering at Aveva and Gregg Le Blanc, senior vice president of Information Management at Aveva, outline the company’s integrated portfolio and elaborate on the product roadmap for 2022 and beyond. Le Blanc pointed out that 50 per cent of data was created in the last two years and how this will continue even in 2024. Meanwhile, according to the Seagate Rethink Data Survey, – IDC, 2020, while 56 per cent of data is captured through operations, 68 per cent of data goes unleveraged. With half a century of experience and over 20,000 customers, Aveva believes it is uniquely placed to deliver a complete digital thread purpose built for the industry.

“Industrial companies struggle to share timely, accurate data across their global ecosystem. And organisations that share data externally with its partners generate 3X more measurable economic benefit than those that do not,” said Le Blanc. “We launched Aveva Data Hub earlier this year, a software-as-a-service offering that enables businesses to gain operational efficiencies, boost sustainability and drive digital transformation with data sharing capabilities. Data is the accelerator of the connected economy, and our open and agnostic solutions leverage customers’ existing investments and enable a connected community across the ecosystem.”

Driving digital transformation 
With digital twins gaining momentum currently, thanks to rapidly evolving simulation and modelling capabilities, better interoperability and IoT sensors, and more available tools and computing infrastructure, Gartner predicts that the digital twin market will cross the chasm in 2026 to reach $183bn in revenue by 2031. For clarity, a digital twin is a virtual presentation of an object or system that serves as the real-time digital counterpart of a physical object or a process. “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, improve asset reliability, reduce costs and resource use, and minimise carbon emissions,” commented Sabharwal.

During the event, Aveva announced that its engineering information management solutions, the core of its digital twin, now deliver more significant time and value gains for capital projects and operations. In addition, its customers can now experience a complete digital twin within just 60 days, even in the absence of existing models. Through two new partnerships, Aveva’s engineering information management solutions are now integrated with Assai’s integrated document management system, and data is captured by NavVis’ wearable mobile mapping systems. As a result, laser scans can be delivered much faster than the existing stationary scanners. “Digital twins have never been more important. They will play a central role in uncovering opportunities to unlock ingenuity and achieve the efficiency and sustainability gains needed to enable net-zero carbon emissions,” added Sabharwal.

Customer success stories 
With over 2500 delegates joining the event in person and online, more than 70 companies in 12 industry verticals shared their experience of the data-led digital transformation. The guest speaker at the event, Dr Catherine Green, associate professor at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University, explains how data helped develop the Oxford vaccine. “Despite lockdowns and remote working, we 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,” she commented.

“We are at the transition point where you can 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, deliver the solution, and communicate with the healthcare sector and with the public.” Michael Dean, global director of Kellogg’s Power, Controls and Information System, explained how the company’s platform investment has yielded benefits in terms of scale, consistency, standardisation and collaboration. “Kellogg’s has 50 manufacturing sites worldwide, and installing Aveva PI System has helped leverage, analyse and manage energy data in its factories, creating a digital ecosystem that benchmarked usage and identified opportunities for savings,” observed Dean. “As a result, we saved $3.3m in a single year, identified an additional $1.8m in rebates, and optimised abatement measures.”

Meanwhile, Jan Broekman, vice president of Global Engineering and Smart Modularisation, at McDermott, offered insight into how digital solutions integrated multiple inputs to build a sustainable capital project, including real-time commodity prices and low-carbon design.

The event also witnessed an intriguing panel discussion on digital agility and resiliency. Sophie Borgne, senior vice president – Digital Power Line of Business at Schneider Electric, explained how they have cut carbon emissions by 25 per cent. “We have been looking at sustainability for a long time, and earlier, we lacked real-time data and insight on how to improve operational efficiency. Our partnership with Aveva helped deploy the right tools, which increased the visibility and real-time information to help operators make the right decisions. As a result, we reduced electricity use by 25 per cent, and also we cut overall carbon emission by 25 per cent.” Meanwhile, Dean stated the explicit goals of Kellogg’s for 2030 and 2050. “We look at how to manufacture products more sustainably. For instance, we leveraged the Aveva PI System, which significantly reduced our energy consumption.

Jacky Wright, the chief digital officer at 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 further explained how data analytics has supported smart buildings, investment in renewable energy to power data centres, and driven strategic decisions to pay for the removal of 1.3 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

What’s next
Aveva envisions optimising the entire industrial ecosystem, connecting people with industrial intelligent-as-a-service. “We apply the advanced, proven technologies to drive our customer’s success and enable them to achieve more. Going forward, we are building blocks for the Aveva industrial metaverse using Aveva XR to solve many different customers use cases in operations engineering,” said Andrew McCloskey, CTO and EVP – R&D in the closing note.