Article submitted by Alessandro Semenzato – Project Manager at Schneider Electric
- Tell us about Schneider Electric. What is your core business and role within the project?
Schneider’s purpose is to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all.
Our mission is to be digital partner for Sustainability and Efficiency.
We drive digital transformation by integrating world-leading process and energy technologies to realize the full efficiency and sustainability opportunities for customer’s business.
In the ECOFACT project, we are going to bring our expertise in connecting products, controls, software and services. We want to take up the challenge of a fast-pace changing environment, we want to walk on new and unexplored paths to enhance lifecycle solutions and end-point to cloud integration.
- Why did your organisation get involved in the ECOFACT project? How does this activity fit with the normal business of your organisation?
Schneider Electric develops certified equipment to monitor electrical and thermal energy consumption in buildings and manufacturing sites.
Our customers can already rely on our platform to collect and analyse their consumption data.
The connection of all active systems under one monitoring umbrella and the enhancement of the analysis algorithms to optimize any manufacturing process are an extremely interesting frontier, it can open the door to new solutions for both our factories and our customers.
- How will the outputs of the ECOFACT project help production system energy performance?
Schneider electric is very sensitive to sustainability and energy efficiency issues, most of the times energy monitoring systems are not exploited at 100% of their potential because this requires knowledge of the platform, knowledge of the systems and time.
The ECOFACT platform can drastically reduce the complexity of the evaluations needed to optimize the management of a production line or even an entire factory, it could give right suggestions to reduce the environmental impact of the activity, saving energy and resources.
- What are the technical challenges your work in ECOFACT is trying to overcome?
We will try to give a new guise to our platform Ecostruxure Power Monitoring Expert, we are imagining new ways to use it, we would like to extend its range of application improving its interoperability towards upstream connections.
We would like to make our platform a central node of the data brokerage layer, overcoming its hystorical fame of simple data repository.
- What positive impacts will the projects have when complete?
We do want to the project to be a disruptive element in the manufacturing panorama.
The project outcome will allow companies to see their products not only in terms of production costs and revenues, but also in terms of impact on the environment and resource consumption.
We do hope the project outcome will increase the sensitivity of the customers towards sustainability topics.
