Schneider Electric to unlock hidden value of industrial assets

Schneider Electric will insert Transpara's solutions into its IIoT products

Schneider Electric, the global specialist in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, has signed a global OEM and distribution partnership agreement with Transpara, a developer of real-time monitoring, visualisation, and alerting software.

Under the terms of the agreement, Schneider Electric will provide its customers with new IIoT solutions that enhance data visibility, context, and alerting so they can seize real-time control of their critical business risks, including risks to the efficiency, reliability, safety, and profitability of their operations.

“As our customers continue their digital journeys, they seek to make their operating assets more intelligent, but aggregating, contextualising, and applying the data that comes from those assets and asset sets in a meaningful way continues to be a challenge,” said Chris Lyden, senior vice president, Process Automation, Schneider Electric.

“Partnering with best-in-breed providers like Transpara helps us address these issues. Transpara’s focus on key performance indicators, which succinctly contextualise critical operating data in a user-friendly format on any device, give our customers a live view of their operations. This allows them to make better real-time decisions that improve the efficiency, reliability, safety, and profitability of their operations. This partnership promises to help our customers keep pace with the increasing speed of business while driving immediate results to their bottom lines,” he added.

Transpara extends Schneider Electric’s customer analytics portfolio to include real-time KPIs, dashboards and alerting that span multiple data sources on the fly, including intelligent machines, intelligent edge devices, and other IT infrastructure, as well as cybersecurity data, business applications, and web services.

For example, Transpara software can detect if the performance of a process analyser has degraded. By alerting operators to that trend, proactive maintenance can be performed before an incident arises, allowing greater real-time control over process and asset efficiency and reliability, while increasing operator safety. The partnership will also allow real-time data to reach more audiences – including business executives, field services, and maintenance providers, either remotely or on-premise – without the need for training and experience.

The partnership combines Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IIoT capabilities with Transpara’s Visual KPI solutions to help customers in operationally-intensive industries, including refining, petrochemical, energy, and mining, better understand and control the performance of their equipment and other assets.

Visual KPI software aggregates multiple existing or external data sources on the fly without moving the data, including operations, financial and infrastructure information, and delivers role-based, actionable KPIs and alerts to end users, regardless of their location or device. Visual KPI applies context to data generated by different types of assets – from historians to relational databases to business intelligence tools and web services – and presents it in a visually appealing, fully mobile-responsive interface so the information and data are easily digestible and accessible without training.

The agreement includes both a reseller component and OEM relationship. The reseller agreement enables Schneider Electric to offer Transpara’s Visual KPI solution directly and through channel providers, as well as provide services to help customers deploy the software on-premise or in the cloud.

The OEM portion of the agreement allows Schneider Electric to embed Visual KPI’s server, client and/or edge software directly in Schneider Electric devices of varying levels of intelligence, including everything from process analysers and motor control centres to pumps and valves, and then extend these capabilities across products in a consistent, cleaner, and more user-friendly manner.

In both arrangements, customers will gain immediate visibility to the entirety of their operations and all their data sources, which means they will be able to more quickly understand and eliminate unplanned downtime, make their processes more efficient, and drive measurable improvements to the profitability of their operations, safely.

“In the near-term, Transpara technology will enhance our industry-leading IIoT-enabled EcoStruxure process automation offers, including our EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS and EcoStruxure Process Analysers, while continuing to drive immediate value for existing customers,” Lyden said. “In the long-term, the partnership will hasten the evolution of our own next-generation process automation solutions that will extend real-time business control right to the asset layer in a full IIoT environment.”

EcoStruxure is Schneider Electric’s open, interoperable, IoT-enabled system architecture and platform. EcoStruxure delivers enhanced value around safety, reliability, efficiency, sustainability, and connectivity for customers. EcoStruxure leverages advancements in IoT, mobility, sensing, cloud, analytics, and cybersecurity to deliver Innovation at Every Level.

This includes connected products, edge control, and apps, analytics, and services. EcoStruxure has been deployed in 480,000+ sites, with the support of 20,000+ system integrators and developers, connecting over 1.6 million assets under management through 40+ digital services.

“Today’s highly connected IIoT landscape yields massive business opportunity for any operationally driven organisation, but only if their data reaches the right people, at the right time, with immediate and obvious context in a user-friendly way,” said Michael Saucier, chief executive officer, Transpara.

“Our partnership with Schneider Electric combines the best of both companies: our real-time, visually intuitive monitoring and analytics and Schneider Electric’s substantial array of digitally-enabled products and managed services for industrial organisations. Together we will deliver continuous innovation that empowers our customers to move from simply managing business performance to controlling it in real time,” he added.