PlantStruxure benefits automation and energy management

PlantStruxure integrates both hardware and software components throughout the plant, offering flexible, scalable and collaborative architectures. It delivers a complete process management system that helps companies to optimise their energy usage and drive maximum efficiency within their operations, while also improving productivity. Note that as well as being suitable for use in process industry environments, PlantStruxture can also be used by manufacturers of discrete products and in mixed production environments; for example, PlantStruxture can be implemented for batch control, motion control, process control, safety systems and automation across single or multiple sites.

Michel Crochon, the Executive Vice President for Industry Business at Schneider Electric, comments: "Today industrial companies face a multitude of challenges on different fronts, including increased competitive pressures, a volatile global economy, tighter compliance and regulatory requirements and higher costs of materials. To compete in this new world, collaboration and decision-making based on actionable and relevant information is essential. PlantStruxure breaks down information silos with open, standards-based technologies to drive speed and agility - helping users gain a unique competitive advantage. "

PlantStruxure provides for easy collaboration between plant and operation managers, as well as engineering and maintenance teams, through its powerful software suite combined with field-proven hardware and open Ethernet-based technologies. It enables high process availability and offers redundancy and functional safety at each level of the architecture to meet the requirements of industries such as food and drink, oil and gas, chemical, petrochemical, power and mining. Through architectures based on intelligent energy management, organisations that use PlantStruxure benefit from reduced costs associated with project development, operation and production, while gaining real-time visibility of business performance, improved compliance and return on investment.

Single environment

Crochon continues: "Traditionally, process automation systems, energy management systems, production management systems and even plant design and engineering tools have each occupied separate domains. Manufacturers and the industry in general are increasingly moving to single environments encompassing production management, energy management and control systems functions, as well as business information."

With PlantStruxure, Schneider Electric leverages its experience in the domains of automation, process control and energy management to deliver a system that provides a single architecture for all process control needs. The system enables users to optimise their plant efficiency, reduce operating costs and improve energy efficiency by implementing strategies that combine all of these aspects across the entire lifecycle of their system.

Craig Resnick, a Research Director at ARC Advisory Group who wrote a white paper Schneider Electric Deploys New PlantStruxure Platform that was published in October 2009, comments: "Conventional approaches to process automation and operations management are evolving as processors and manufacturers demand enhanced visualisation, intelligence, control and agility, which requires increased power and energy management capabilities.

"A collaborative framework, such as Schneider Electric's PlantStruxure platform, will encourage the further breakdown of barriers to information by enabling a more comprehensive multi-disciplined operational strategy, which, in turn, impacts productivity, responsiveness, lifecycle costs, energy efficiency and, most importantly, profitability."

For further information, please call Schneider Electric on +44 (0)870 608 8 608 or visit www.schneider-electric.co.uk. Alternatively, follow the link to download a copy of the White Paper Schneider Electric Deploys New PlantStruxure Platform (620kB PDF).