A light board displayed at Schneider Electric's plant in Grenoble, France. (Photo: Jeff Pachoud)
Global industries need to embrace and not fear automation if they are serious about reducing their carbon footprint, according to a senior executive at one of the world's largest energy management and digital automation companies.
"If an industrial outfit craves efficiencies and an improvement in throughput that's meaningful enough to make a difference to its headline performance and reduce carbon emissions - it needs to automate and digitize," Barbara Frei, Executive Vice President, Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric, said in an interview.
"Optimized modern processing is all about knowing real-time what is going on in your factory, so you can make different decisions for a better outcome, whether they are reactive or predictive, aided by technology."
Frei said such an operating dynamic is already here and is only going to get better. "More so, as the entire manufacturing and industrial complex begins to join the dots between process efficiencies and lowering carbon emissions."
The Schneider automation boss said, for its part, her company embraced the open automation international standard IEC 61499 five years ago. "This has two aspects to it. First one is that you detach the hardware from the software. It makes the cycle on the software renewal independent of the hardware. So for a more performative application, change the hardware or software at will."
In simple terms, industries can compartmentalize, section and upgrade specific aspects of their manufacturing kit and infrastructure and go down a phased automation and digitization path.
Barbara Frei, Executive Vice President, Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric.
"The second aspect is the breaking down of barriers and getting the traditional operational technology (OT) data to the information technology (IT) level, and make the entire manufacturing or processing chain data driven. Simply put - comprehend your whole factory via one control platform."
Eyeing the approaching low-carbon horizon, Schneider Electric is heavily marketing its hybrid plant distributed control system (DCS) and automation software under its EcoStruxure product suite.
The company is also switching from a perpetual to a subscription approach for its energy management and automation software sales, a model widely deployed these days by software vendors like Microsoft for the sale of their computing software at a consumer level.
Frei acknowledges subscription model is, and will continue to be, adopted by the company's competitors as well.
"What has already happened in the IT world is increasingly happening in the OT world for us and our competitors. However, we are shaping the market with our open automation approach and our software can work on different hardware."
The company also claims to have a competitive advantage boasting of several industrial software brands under its wing such as AVEVA. "Our suite of software companies enables us to offer solutions for designing, building, operating and maintaining facilities across industries; something that very few others can replicate.
"We co-develop solutions with customers. And we are engineers, technologists and automation consultants too, with the latter being a fast growing business for us."
Rounding up the interview, Frei recalled that digitization was not even a topic in the manufacturing and industrial space 20 years ago.
"And now there are whole new industries to cater to that adopt digitization and automation as a starting point. It is one of the most exciting times to be an engineer and be in the sector that I am in."
