Partnership promises energy savings

01-Jul-2013 - Last updated on 17-Jul-2013 at 08:47 GMT

The software is said to offer more visibility for more effective decisions

Energy management specialist Schneider Electric has launched a partnership programme with other technology providers under the title EcoStruxure. The aim is to enable open data communications between buildings and process equipment across enterprises and from the factory shopfloor to the board room.

EcoStruxure, which is based on Schneider’s StruxureWare software platform suite, is designed to help companies deliver efficiency on top of energy management, according to Schneider UK president Stuart Thoroughgood.

It aims to bring five areas of expertise together: power management; process and machine management; IT room management; buildings management; and security management through an integrated, open platform.

Save 30% of energy costs

“It will help people save up to 30% of their energy costs,” claimed Thoroughgood. “It’s all about consolidating our software suites into one platform. We can’t save what we can't see and [Struxureware] brings transparency to the market – from the shopfloor to the top floor.”

Thoroughgood added: “It’s all around the alliances we are able to put together.” Schneider Electric has already established strategic alliances with IBM and Cisco, among a number of firms, and expects more to follow. “It’s going to be about Apps," he said, “openness and being able to move data around … things we can’t even think about today.”

Schneider Electric’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer Aaron Davis claimed that StruxureWare gave the visibility to make decisions more effectively and in real-time. It makes use of an open platform with data shared through web-based technology. The future will be about “opex” (operational expenditure) and not “capex” (capital expenditure), he said. “You are seeing one version of the truth; one set of data … The holy grail is predictive performance.”

‘Critical issue’

Davis added: “Cyber security is going to be a critical issue for the next 10 years, for sure. It’s a huge, huge topic for us.”

In UK food manufacturing, the sectors likely to be first to implement StruxureWare are the bakery and confectionery sectors, said Schneider’s segment manager for food and beverage Mark Staples, and the company is already talking to customers in these areas.

“StruxureWare is about the software for all of the different systems: from enterprise resource planning to human machine interfaces; from supervisory control and data acquisition to buildings management systems; and from security lighting to heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems and making sure they are interoperable,” said Staples.