Partnerships are all the rage these days within the manufacturing technology market. Here are two from British software supplier AVEVA—one with Shell and another with Microsoft. As for the Microsoft announcement, this is not unusual or new. Microsoft has penetrated the industrial software market over the past 20+ years indirectly through aligning with suppliers. Most suppliers even maintain engineers in Redmond to ensure early knowledge as well as feedback.
AVEVA and Shell for workforce
First up, AVEVA has signed an agreement to help accelerate Shell Global Solutions International B.V’s digital transformational strategy. it will provide Shell with its Engineering Data Warehouse technology, which is one of the building blocks of the digital twin. This will enable a common digital thread across Engineering, Operations, and Maintenance and the ability to securely deliver information in context from a single source to decision makers across these critical functions.
This solution is expected to drive asset reliability, enhance efficiency, and reduce unplanned downtime. It also supports Shell’s ambition to empower staff across Shell’s manufacturing sites and to keep frontline industrial workers safe while ensuring business continuity and operational resilience.
“Empowering workers requires access to all the information as today’s new normal entails remote access to monitor, manage and optimize production facilities,” commented Johan Krebbers, GM Digital Emerging Technologies / VP IT Innovation at Shell. “We are already witnessing the benefits of our strategic collaboration with AVEVA through our fully aligned vision for digital transformation”. This has enabled us to conduct operations remotely as well as seamlessly access the necessary applications to provide the insight, guidance and tools to ensure safe, effective and consistent work output, specific to each role.
“We are delighted that Shell has chosen to extend its long and robust existing strategic partnership with AVEVA to support in enabling the digital twin cloud-based services,” commented Ravi Gopinath, Chief Cloud Officer and Chief Product Officer, AVEVA. “This deployment is part of Shell’s recently announced strategy to deploy digital twin technology across its manufacturing sites. Implementing new technologies like IIoT, extended reality, and artificial intelligence has huge advantages with the digital twin of an operating environment and this cutting-edge technology is guaranteed to deliver immediate improvements for Shell’s operations.”
AVEVA and Microsoft Focus on Cloud and AI
AVEVA will be extending its long-standing strategic collaboration with Microsoft to focus on Microsoft cloud services—especially Microsoft Azure (infrastructure, data and AI services). Expected benefits include helping customers achieve implementations quicker, connect teams more readily, and drive growth opportunities.
Key focus areas include the connected worker and building a common Asset Strategy (Asset Performance).
Over the past few years, digital transformation has been changing the way the manufacturing and energy industries approach business sustainability while seeking robust technologies to run their operations efficiently. As the sector transitions to working differently in a digital-first new normal, AVEVA is collaborating with Microsoft to support its customer vison of creating profitable business outcomes that will enable them to thrive in today’s challenging macro environment. AVEVA may also explore opportunities to collaborate on environmental sustainability in the future.
According to an AVEVA survey, 86% of organizations agree that digital transformation is a key component of their company’s strategic plan today. While almost all industrial companies know that cloud adoption is a key element of their digital transformation, a large portion did not have concrete plans to execute their cloud strategy before the pandemic. AVEVA is working with Microsoft to help customers explore new ways to leverage the value of cloud technologies as well as Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics.
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