Frost & Sullivan was invited to attend Schneider Electric’s Software Conference 2017 in October in San Antonio, and had exclusive access to its industry vision and roadmap, as well as direct interactions with Schneider Electric’s executive team.
The packed three-day business agenda included presentations on Schneider Electric’s various solutions with a special mention to food & beverage, a new technology partner introduction for its asset performance management (APM) solution, the introduction of a subscription license model with access extension, several executive keynotes, industrial software innovation sessions, and exclusive one-on-ones for industry analysts.
Schneider Electric highlighted several important facts, figures, and topics:
It has extended its prominent worldwide position with more than 2 million licenses for its software platform, more than 4,000 partners using its existing platform, and more than 4 trillion transactions monitored every day.
The company leverages its industrial software platform across its 5 core pillars: world-class ecosystem, leading and flexible technology, open and system-agnostic platform, strength of existing installed base, and comprehensive value chain to deliver solutions around digital transformation.
It announced three new solutions for the food & beverage industry: an energy performance solution to maximize energy usage with opportunities for cost reduction; an advanced process control solution to improve yield and minimize unpredictable variations in the drying process; and a label assurance solution to fulfill label inspection requirements. All are focused on driving operational efficiency and supporting sustainability-related regulations.
It continues to strengthen its cloud platform with a new performance module, Insight Performance, with improved asset utilization analysis and downtime monitoring capabilities. Insight Performance connected to a hosted online environment has shown unique benchmark analysis across cross-plant systems supporting improved asset reliability and enhanced performance and operational activities. The new offering supports both cloud and hybrid deployment environments, reducing cost and complexity.
The company’s new foundations for growth include leveraging its strength in infrastructure projects for data centers, transportation, facility management, and smart cities. The company has experienced higher demand not only from traditional process industries but also from airports and ports for modernization projects. All of them are conventionally built on different systems; therefore, Schneider Electric leverages its “systems of systems,” connecting and analyzing all the workflows from disparate data sources for major control of infrastructure and support of system integration, operational efficiency, energy optimization, and security regulations.
The company announced its recent partnership with MaxGrip for optimizing and extending its enterprise APM solution. The company has made significant inroads in the simplification of data collection and management, and provision of real-time data; the new partnership support customers’ asset reliability strategy around cost control, resource allocation, usage of OT/IT systems, root cause analysis, and asset utilization.
Schneider Electric introduced a subscription licensing model, with subscription access replacing upfront costs and capital expenditures. The opportunity for customers to tailor the software license and applications to their needs with an à la carte approach is a key differentiator. This option is available for engineering, planning, operations, and asset performance solutions.
Overall, the company showed a clear understanding of market dynamics and the need for an open software platform for multiple industries. Healthy figures; new solutions for the oil & gas, power, mining, and food & beverage industries; and new partnerships made it clear that Schneider Electric is leading the way for digital transformation.
