Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Announcements from Innovation Summit Barcelona

Schneider Electric Launches EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors Suite for Smart Operations

Schneider Electric announced its new EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors suite to help food and beverage; mining, minerals and metals; oil and gas; water and wastewater; and other industrial enterprises leverage their industrial automation data to increase operational profitability.

EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors, a specialized suite of smart manufacturing apps and digital services, provides data-driven manufacturers with easy to understand real-time analytics for prompt decision making. 

The suite’s modular and scalable approach to implementation helps make it cost-effective for plants to quickly turn the volumes of data they produce into the actionable insights they need to reach world class levels of operational efficiency, profitability and sustainability.

Data-driven Plant Performance Management

Blurring the line between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT), the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is producing unprecedented amounts of cloud-based, plant-wide and asset-level data. EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors collect, measure and analyze that information and recommend cost effective actions to take for continuous improvement. Transformative business models, including asset optimization and asset performance management, predictive maintenance and real-time decision-making, drive efficiency and resilience in increasingly competitive industrial environments.

EcoStruxure Plant Advisors are fully configurable, off-the-shelf solutions for easy integration into even the most advanced systems. By providing users with a familiar application theme and environment, an efficient plant can create synergies for processes and empower digital operators. This greatly reduces the user learning curve, saving time and money. 

Schneider Electric’s modular and scalable EcoStruxure Plant Advisors suite includes:

• EcoStruxure Pumping Performance Advisor is a new digital service for the continuous improvement of water and wastewater pumping assets in 24/7 operations. By addressing challenges such as cost of water, plants can save up to 15% in OPEX through pump optimization.
• EcoStruxure Equipment Efficiency Advisor provides real-time efficiency root cause analysis. It then recommends appropriate action plans for increasing capacity while reducing unscheduled downtime and waste, which often results in immediate 5% to 10% OEE gains.
• EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor uses augmented reality to slash the amount of time a worker spends looking for information to about a tenth of current levels. By superimposing real-time data and virtual objects (point of interest, documentation, procedures) onto cabinets or machines, this “contactless maintenance” model also increases safety. EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor V2.4 is easy to customize; no special platform knowledge is required. Users can also easily add augmented reality into existing procedures and export notes and analysis to share with others.
• EcoStruxure Secure Connect Advisor with embedded cybersecurity provides a digitally secure and simple asset monitoring connection for remote diagnostic and maintenance that reduces plant downtime while saving time and travel costs to maintain critical assets. In some cases, this has resulted in a shortened time to solution from over 7 days to as little as 4 hours.

Schneider Electric Announces Enhancements to EcoStruxure Power Platform

Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, today announced a significant evolution in its EcoStruxure Power architecture and platform, with the launch of its third-generation offering.

First announced in 2016, EcoStruxure Power is an IoT-enabled platform that digitizes and simplifies low and medium-voltage electrical distribution systems. It provides actionable data to aid the decisions that help protect people, safeguard assets, maximize operational efficiency and business continuity, and maintain regulatory compliance.

This major new update builds on the existing set of digital applications that EcoStruxure Power delivers, with innovative enhancements that offer increased safety, efficiency, and reliability in power distribution.  

Leveraging the power of digitization for electrical distribution

EcoStruxure Power - new customer benefits at a glance

• Safety:

Continuous Thermal Monitoring reduces the risk of electrical fires by signaling early detection of faulty connections and abnormal temperature rises within installations. What’s more, by reducing or eliminating the need for periodic thermographic inspections, total cost of ownership can be reduced by up to 60 percent throughout the lifecycle compared to traditional methods. Available for low-voltage as well as medium-voltage systems for comprehensive coverage of the power distribution infrastructure. 

Active Arc Flash Protection is augmented with Easergy protection relays that have been updated with a built-in arc flash protection function and offer seamless integration into our edge control software EcoStruxure Power Monitoring Expert and EcoStruxure Power SCADA Operation. This is beneficial to maintenance operators who are responsible for keeping the risks associated with electrical safety / arc flashes to an absolute minimum.

• Efficiency:

With the Energy Performance application, it is already possible to integrate Power Monitoring Expert with SCADA systems for optimized supervisory energy management. Now, however, we are harnessing the capabilities of EcoStruxure Power by partnering with world leading engineering technology providers, AVEVA. As part of this partnership, we are integrating Power Monitoring Expert with AVEVA’s industrial software - Wonderware, so now facility managers can access important KPI data based on energy consumption activity to compare, benchmark and analyze energy data usage per process application. This makes it an ideal tool for sectors like automotive and consumer packaged goods.

PowerLogic PowerTag is a robust energy monitoring system that provides complete visibility into how power is distributed by your electrical panels. The energy sensors fit directly onto the circuit breaker – wireless, self-powered, no tools required. Collecting information from every circuit means always knowing which loads are using the most energy, which enhances energy and operational efficiency.

• Cybersecurity:

Easergy P5 protection relays, Easergy T300 remote terminal units, and the Enerlin'X IFE switchboard server have all been reinforced, in line with Schneider Electric’s stringent cybersecurity strategy, and in accordance with the established ISA/IEC 62443 global standard for the security of Industrial Control System networks.

The new EcoStruxure Cybersecurity Admin Expert is a comprehensive and intuitive cybersecurity configuration and policy tool for operational technology environments that enables system-wide cybersecurity policy management.