Schneider Electric launches EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor to increase operational profitability through Edge and Data analytics in the Cloud

Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, today launched EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor, the next evolution in IIoT digital plant management. A scalable, open IIoT platform built within the company’s EcoStruxure™ architecture, it gives industrial enterprises focused insights to understand process and operational data and uniquely enables common cross-function, live monitoring and application data sharing. This leads to faster improvements in operational performance, improved quality control, reduction in energy and raw materials use, better maintenance and increased profitability. 

Developed for and perfected with Schneider Electric’s worldwide Smart Factories, EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor empowers operations and productions professionals with meaningful, specific business insights through contextualized live data, enabling them to make improvements in machine performance, predictive maintenance and asset performance. A common data model also optimizes remote plant operations, enables regional and global scalability across multiple plants and improves downstream and upstream traceability across the value chain. Based on pilot projects, EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor could generate € 2.8 million / year of improvements for a typical €100 million manufacturing site. 

“The volume of data available to industrial enterprises is growing exponentially. However, the prevalence of legacy and proprietary systems and a lack of OT/IT integration mean industrial businesses lack the end-to-end visibility needed to rapidly adjust their operations,” said Sophie Borgne, Senior Vice President of Digital Plant Business, Schneider Electric. “As a business with over 200 manufacturing sites around the world, this is a problem we have faced ourselves. Deploying EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor has upgraded our own resilience and productivity. It has also equipped our smart factory teams with the tools to optimize operations at a local and global level. Having perfected the platform, we are delighted to extend the benefits of EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor to the marketplace.”

The EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor includes three key interconnected parts:

1. Hybrid (Edge/Cloud) Connectivity: Agnostic edge-to-cloud approach to manage data source connectivity lifecycle within the same industrial data model.
2. Industrial data processing platform and multisite analysis: Data aggregation and processing enabling remote and live monitoring through near real time multisite KPIs and analytics.
3. App builder and industry specific offers: The ability to build custom applications in a low code/ no code environment, leveraging prebuilt IoT modules and centralized access to all production data to meet specific business needs.

Typical benefits delivered by EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor include up to:

• 15% reduction in unplanned downtime
• 30% reduction in maintenance costs
• 8% reduction in energy costs
• 6% raw materials consumption reduction
• 6% increase in quality of outputs
• 5% reduction in product recall costs
• 6-11% Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) improvements of a given plant

Enterprise-Wide Operational Intelligence

Modern industrial enterprises are under enormous pressure to increase agility to meet dynamic global demand, highlighting plant operational efficiency and cost. Siloed data and the increasingly complex systems prevalent in industrial enterprise environments are hindering the ability to quickly adapt operations to meet rapidly changing social and economic requirements. 

“The need for agility cannot be over emphasized for industrial operations,” said Craig Resnick, Vice President, ARC Advisory Group. “The EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor suite provides industrial operations with the real-time visibility needed to understand the intricacies of operations that enables this agility. This information empowers a business to pivot and an operation to maximize production efficiency while reducing energy consumption, waste, and labor costs.”

By consolidating the enormous amount of data industrial enterprises produce into a centralized hub, EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor makes it easy for end users to access, aggregate and contextualize all operation related information. Leveraging data from the natively integrated smart solutions, the platform provides the actionable business and operational intelligence needed to enhance plant efficiency.

EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor also harmonizes global governance while allowing standardized local customization to enable businesses to speed up IoT solutions deployment and easily scale them across multiple plants. This flexibility is essential for industrial enterprises to address modern challenges and thrive in today’s global, digital economy.

Enterprise-Wide Digital Transformation

EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor uses a modular and customizable approach combined with dedicated consulting support provided by Schneider Electric. This allows the EcoStruxureTM Plant Advisor to cover the full plant lifecycle while providing only the required resources based on each industrial enterprise’s unique requirements and digital maturity. 

EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor includes cross industry and segment specific offers for sectors including CPG, Mining and Manufacturing, using a global standardized hybrid environment to provide immediate operational impact.

EcoStruxure™ Plant Advisor is now available on Schneider Electric Exchange, the world’s first open ecosystem dedicated to solving real-world sustainability and efficiency challenges.