Tap into the power of technology partnerships to drive sustainability gains

Written Bry Dillon, SVP Partner and Business Development, AVEVA

Sustainability has long ceased to be just a corporate buzzword. In today’s business landscape, it is a competitive advantage that can drive long-term success.

This is something Sam Paul, Section Manager of Process Automation / SCADA Systems & Projects at the Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources (DWR) in Georgia state has first-hand experience with. The utility purifies drinking water and fresh and gray water services, delivering over 70 million gallons every day to more than a million residents. Besides ensuring uninterrupted supplies, utilities like DWR must tackle urgent issues such as climate change, water scarcity and conservation.

As its output has grown, DWR has clocked growing amounts of data. With six facilities and hundreds of plant assets, its growing dataset holds more than half a million data points. As facilities have been added and expanded, this data resided across a wide range of multiple operational systems and data silos.

Digital backbone in the cloud

The game-changer was reconciling these data points around a digital central nervous system in the cloud for real-time analytics. Paul and his team met their data optimization challenge by onboarding a hybrid software as a service (SaaS) solution with AVEVA Unified Operations Center and AVEVA Insight delivered in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

“Now we have a wonderful solution that people from all the levels—operations, maintenance, engineering, scientists—can access the data… from anywhere they are,” Paul says.

Teams from shop floor to top floor can now access real-time data from across multiple systems within a single source of truth. Together with instant forecasts, this live data helps identify non-revenue water leakages, boosting clean water delivery by 20%. A single optimization saved 120 million gallons of water and $35,000 per year.

Digital collaboration for sustainability

These gains are typical of the way cloud-based digital collaboration can drive sustainability outcomes.

Seamlessly integrating data in a single central repository enables insightful analyses, unlocking actionable but previously hidden intelligence. Unified data in the cloud enables operators to make confident and informed decisions, identify trends, and seize opportunities swiftly. Rather than being a source of frustration, underutilized data becomes a strategic asset for business success.

Another example comes from ENEL. As the world’s largest player in renewables, the company has more than 1,200 power plants in 21 countries. It needed a holistic view of operations, to optimize performance across its network and scale its business in response to changing market conditions.

With AVEVA’s help, ENEL created a real-time digital data backbone to serve as a single source of truth spanning all its assets. Artificial intelligence-infused analytics were layered over the data thread with the aim of eliminating data silos and predicting potential failures.

Solutions used here include the cloud-based AVEVA Data Hub, AVEVA Edge Data Store, AVEVA PI System and AVEVA Predictive Analytics.

The renewable energy leader doesn’t just benefit from faster and more accurate decision-making. Key performance gains also include over 220 real events being detected early, preventing asset failures. Overall, ENEL has optimized performance across 20GW and 1,275 assets of power generation.

Excellence in innovation

The strength of AVEVA’s solutions for these and other industries was recognized yet again recently. AVEVA has been named a finalist in two categories of Microsoft’s prestigious 2023 Partner of the Year Award: the Microsoft Sustainability Changemaker and the Microsoft Industrials & Manufacturing Partner of the Year.

The awards distinguish solutions demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation based on Microsoft technology. Honorees were chosen from a set of more than 4,200 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries.

This two-fold acknowledgment testifies how our software and global partner network enable unbroken collaboration at scale for customers, helping them respond to urgent sustainability needs.

AVEVA’s joint solutions with Microsoft are empowering industry to achieve long-term decarbonization in line with the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Repeatable, scalable and adaptable

Together with Microsoft, we help industries—among the largest greenhouse gas emitters— harness the power of industrial big data management, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital twins to advance sustainability. Working with Microsoft, AVEVA has templated its best practices and vertical solutions to become repeatable, scalable and adaptable to integrate agnostically with other software stacks, enabling rapid implementation and payback across industries.

In manufacturing, energy and other industrial sectors, organizations deploying combined AVEVA and Microsoft solutions can now cut project implementation times up to 60% when compared to the bespoke executions—thanks to a collaborative, real-time, 360-degree view of the value chain, and AI-infused maintenance and operations.

By partnering with AVEVA and leveraging our 5,000-strong global partner ecosystem, customers can unlock the full potential of digital transformation for sustainable outcomes.