ROSO Automation Technology Co., Ltd. is a high-tech enterprise specializing in the research and development, production, and sales of zipper dyeing production lines. The company faced challenges in digitizing their machines and transforming from simple to smart manufacturing. Traditional zipper production was labor-intensive, incurring high labor costs with low product added value. The company also had to deal with the dual challenges of manufacturing and operation due to its business model of providing operating services to zipper manufacturers. The lack of digital systems in production and operation at the factory led to errors and omissions during material handover, inconvenient management of onsite logistics, and confusion regarding the locations of finished and semi-finished products. There was also no adequate mechanism for managing the dyeing formulas, which are central to the dyeing process.

The EastLink freeway tunnels in Melbourne, Victoria, run beneath the environmentally sensitive Mullum Mullum Valley, requiring special attention to ventilation of vehicle emissions. The original tunnel ventilation system, commissioned when EastLink opened ten years ago, was designed to expel 100% of tunnel air, including pollutants from vehicles’ combustion engines, through two 45-metre high ventilation stacks. The ventilation system has 24 smaller jet fans which are located within the tunnels to control air flow direction, minimising a piston effect caused by traffic movement in the tunnel, and ten axial larger, 275kW, 690vAC, ventilation fans in the ventilation stacks to draw air up from the tunnels for expulsion at the stack tops. Since the opening of EastLink, the speed of airflows within the tunnels and stacks was controlled in a traditional way - by switching individual fans on and off at pre-programmed times of the day. When switched on, a fan always operated at full speed. This was inefficient, using more electricity than necessary and producing high operating noise levels. It was also causing unnecessary wear and tear on components.

Queensland Rail operates passenger services throughout Queensland, Australia. It is responsible for nearly 51 million customer journeys each year and about 8,000 km of track. The operator used to experience power system incidents affecting the running of its railway network. With 1.5 million visitors expected to descend on the state for the 2018 Commonwealth Games, a major international multi-sport event, a much more reliable system was needed. To master this challenge, Queensland Rail decided to upgrade its network and install a second substation for its inner-city services at the busy Fortitude Valley station in Brisbane. The location presented an extra difficulty as the available space allowed for just a 24-square foot (7.3 m2) container. As a result, solutions used for the substation needed to be compact, while still able to function reliably, efficiently, and effectively.

Sanwa, a plastics manufacturer in Singapore, was facing challenges due to regional competition, a dwindling labour supply, and rising operational costs. They saw digitalization as the solution to improve factory productivity, develop skilled employees, and dramatically boost energy efficiency. They started their digitalization journey in 2016 with two long-term goals: to digitalize and automate their factories, ultimately achieving zero defective parts per million for their clients. They started a pilot project with a single production cell as proof of concept for all their stakeholders. The first automation phase successfully showed that they could do more with the same manpower, with localized data collection. The next step in 2018 was to link more of such production cells together into a data network. Forming that data network was crucial for Sanwa for it determined all the necessary steps forward. Other than productivity, their chief concern was traceability and transparency—they were losing time and money on dated manual reports.

Yunzhibao Foodstuff Co., Ltd., a candy producer in China, was facing challenges due to the manual nature of its production and management processes. The company's operations lacked transparency, and data credibility was compromised due to the handover process between shifts. The company also heavily relied on individual workers, and the inability to capture and accumulate their knowledge and experience was a vulnerable point in Yunzhibao’s operations. The company needed to automate these processes, improve their standardization, and ensure product quality. They also needed to eliminate the 'black box' state of their operations and production, and make all product-related process knowledge transferable.

Mataura Valley Milk, a New Zealand dairy company, aimed to build the world’s best nutritional business that could quickly tailor production to specific customer requirements while guaranteeing the delivery of best-in-class quality products. The company wanted to ensure that its plant can consistently manufacture world-class nutritional products with microbial results well below standard requirements. Over 3,300 Aerobic Plate Count tests were performed during the 2018/19 season to identify colony forming units per gram (cfu/g). Mataura Valley Milk’s highest recorded result was a mere 190 cfu/g, with the accepted limit being 5,000 cfu/g, believed to be a first for New Zealand and indicating that the plant’s critical hygiene areas and processes benchmark performance worldwide.

Granado Pharmácias, Brazil’s oldest cosmetics company, was looking to modernize its traditional manufacturing process to improve production and product traceability. This was crucial for the company to strengthen its brand internationally and continue its expansion. The company had to ensure repeatability in all its production processes and much better traceability of manufacturing information. Any quality issue would result in a product being rejected at the end of the manufacturing chain, affecting output. The company’s management decided to integrate the latest industrial automation into the company’s traditional production process, and began a potentially tricky digital transformation.

ArcelorMittal, the world leader in steel manufacturing, operates the largest steel factory in Western Europe in Dunkirk. The plant delivers 7 million tons of steel annually for various industries. Ensuring consistent product quality is paramount, and any interruption or equipment failure can be costly. Regular maintenance is necessary to ensure safe working conditions and manufacturing continuity. However, performing maintenance usually means shutting down an entire section of a plant, which can take up to two days to resume normal production. ArcelorMittal needed to address this challenge and gain better control over its dust emissions to achieve greater operational flexibility for a recent equipment modernization project.

Hilton wanted to meet a critical need in a city looking to further boost tourism: offer an affordable four-star, focused-service option in an area saturated with five-star offerings. However, Hilton had to answer some tough questions: How could they keep operations lean and efficient? To what extent could they control energy costs? Would they be able to meet tight development timelines and still ensure the facility met their sustainability standards? And, most importantly, could they do all of this and still deliver an exceptional guest experience? The hotel was constructed on a tight timeline and included the added challenge of achieving certification in the LEED building program, the most widely used green building rating system in the world.

Hilton Worldwide, a global hospitality company with over 4,500 properties, faces significant utility bills, which are its second largest operational expense after labor. These costs equate to 5% of the annual revenue raised. The company is not only interested in cutting costs but also aims to be good stewards of the environment. To achieve its multifaceted efficiency and sustainability goals, Hilton sought the expertise of an energy management specialist with a global presence and comprehensive capabilities.

Nemours Children’s Hospital (NCH) in Orlando, Florida is a renowned, state-of-the-art hospital that provides care for children with the most-complex illness and diseases. The hospital is just five years old but already, families seeking world-class pediatric care have come from more than 70 different countries. For hospitals, a pure, continuous source of power in a healing environment is essential. It not only provides reliable electricity for equipment to function 24/7, it also provides staff, patients, and parents with the constant peace-of-mind necessary to maintain a successful recuperation environment. Electricity is the fuel that runs the hospital. To create the power system at Nemours, the hospital called on a team consisting of Schneider Electric EcoXpert and other technology partners. Through collaboration, innovation, and expertise, these four firms combined resources to make the Nemours vision for reliable power a reality.

The Pongola sugar mill, operated by South African food manufacturer RCL Foods, was in dire need of modernization. The proprietary system was almost 30 years old and the plant used to experience between 33 and 40 blackouts per 39-week season. The production delays became unacceptable and a drop in product quality was noticeable. RCL Foods was looking for an off-the-shelf solution that could be expanded over time and that would optimize production efficiency – a scalable system (both hardware and software) that was easy to operate and allowed for remote access. The company wanted to reuse the existing infrastructure where possible, so the new solution had to be both future-proof and backward compatible.

Austin Energy, the eighth largest community owned utility in the U.S., serves more than a million residents in and around the capital city of Texas. The utility’s mission is to convert “big data” into useful information, provide more reliable customer service, and improve energy efficiency, in part by creating a safer, stronger, more resilient power grid. The utility needed to better manage the effects of severe weather, which is the number one cause of power outages, costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year in lost output and wages, spoiled inventory, delayed production, inconvenience, and damage to grid infrastructure. In pursuit of its mission, and with the knowledge that an advanced distribution management system (ADMS) enables better operational decisions by integrating millions of data points into a single, simplified user experience, Austin Energy chose Schneider Electric to implement an ADMS.

The Ruiping Power Plant, a China-based electricity supplier in Henan province, was tasked with meeting China’s demanding national energy-saving and emission-reduction targets. The management team at Ruiping Power wanted to have the ability of seeing, measuring, and managing energy usage across the entire power plant. They were looking for a reliable partner that could provide an end-to-end solution for managing the utility’s energy usage and reduce costs. The team selected Schneider Electric as their partner of choice to take on the full responsibility of process and energy management.

SICAE Somme & Cambraisis, one of France’s regional electrical utilities, was facing the challenge of optimizing grid management in the face of increasing renewable energy sources and the upcoming installation of Linky smart meters. The utility needed to manage a reliable grid that optimized the use of wind energy and met network stability requirements. They were looking for a partner that could help them implement the latest smart grid technology. The utility was also aware of the potential offered by digitization and was the first French utility to deploy Schneider Electric's advanced distribution management system (ADMS).

China Unicom is expanding beyond telecommunications, establishing itself in integrated cloud computing and network connection services. Their plan is to build 12 super-scale cloud data centers and 335 regional data centers throughout China, covering 196 regions and cities. The overall area of these data centers is more than 2 million square meters, containing more than 320,000 racks and with network connection bandwidth of 60T. However, they faced challenges such as insufficient infrastructure support, limited service categories, and scale — inefficient supply chain and immature business models. Perhaps the biggest challenge they faced was the low efficiency of their IT infrastructure operations, putting their goal of running at full capacity 24/7, in the near future, at great risk.

Green Mountain, a data center located in Norway, aimed to establish itself as one of the most efficient data centers in the world with a Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) rating of 1.2. The data center, co-developed by Smedvig, Ergogroup, and Lyse Energi, is located deep inside a mountain and abuts a cold water fjord. The challenge was to power the data center with cheap, reliable, low carbon hydropower and cool it with seawater from the nearby fjord, using gravity as a key factor in the distribution of that cold water to the data center. The goal was to build a zero emissions data center cooled by gravity-enabled sea water distribution and powered exclusively on renewable energies.

Samsung SDI, a global leader in the energy industry, was facing challenges with its power supply. Due to South Korea's centralized power supply systems and geographical nature, long-distance transmission was inevitable. This led to voltage drops causing factory shutdowns about 3 to 4 times a year. Power outages would suspend the running of manufacturing facilities, which could be critical to supply lines of various hazardous materials such as chemicals. It not only took a considerable amount of time to recover the situation but also interrupted manufacturing. Samsung SDI needed equipment that enables reliable power supply. Another challenge was the need for cost reduction. An input voltage of 154,000 V at a production facility causes an instantaneous voltage drop for 10 ms to 50 ms. Most of the machines that read data within 50 ms cost about tens of millions to tens of billions of dollars. Samsung SDI was in need of a UPS that is flexibly-transformable based on on-site conditions, installable into a limited space, and scalable.

Digital Realty, a global data center partner, is trusted with the mission-critical architectures of some of the top companies in social media, financial services, and health care. As the company continues to increase its footprint, it is of critical importance that everything from system architecture to end-user reporting be consistent across all sites. Employing non-standard solutions from site to site leads to operational inefficiencies and inflated costs. With such a diverse portfolio of customers, standardizing operations globally is a must. They currently provide colocation data center services to a diverse base of US and international companies of all sizes in financial services, cloud and information technology, manufacturing, energy, gaming, life sciences, and consumer products. Its 170 data centers serve more than 2,300 customers in 33 metro markets, across 4 continents. They are poised for quick expansion across Europe and Asia-Pacific, and building a consistent infrastructure will be the key to success.

Interxion, a leader in the highly competitive colocation market, is facing the challenge of evolving data centers. These are no longer just data storage facilities but gateways to emerging markets and platforms for business expansion. This evolution requires the deployment of secure IT platforms capable of handling a large amount of real-time data. Interxion needs to provide greater connectivity, more redundancy and power, while aligning with today's environmental and security norms. They also need to stay ahead of the digital curve by providing custom solutions that allow their customers to reach deeper into emerging markets and remain relevant in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

The Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA), the administrator of the state’s pension fund, operates a state-of-the-art colocation data center facility. The facility's ability to attract clients is dependent upon a solid reputation for maintaining system uptime. RSA staff wanted to make absolutely certain that the facility housed the most resilient power and cooling infrastructure available. They decided to turn to Schneider Electric, not only to provide the necessary hardware, but to also deploy IoT enabled architecture EcoStruxureTM IT to support the deployment of cloud-based monitoring tools. The 44,000 square foot colocation facility hosts a diverse group of customers that includes hospitals and universities from across Alabama, TV stations, courthouses and government services from across the state and even Emergency 911 services, uptime and visibility to data center assets have emerged as top priorities for RSA.

Grand Medica, a multi-profile medical center in Novokuznetsk, Siberia, Russian Federation, was created within an existing building that was not originally designed to be a hospital. The project had a tight, 20-month deadline, and the building presented some challenging spatial issues. The design and construction teams wanted an effective, integrated system that covered all the needs of a healthcare facility and would prove flexible enough to support future upgrades and modernization. They also prioritized reliable power and technology that would be flexible and scalable as the facility grew.

Maison Manival, a traditional French bakery located in the heart of the French Alps, was facing the challenge of maintaining the high standards of traditional craftsmanship while ensuring the smooth operation of their modern tools and equipment. The bakery heavily relies on electrical equipment such as ovens and refrigerators. Any electrical failure, such as an overnight power cut to a fridge full of fresh ingredients or baked goods, could result in considerable loss. The founder of Maison Manival wanted to create an efficient environment where artisan bakers could work with greater peace of mind and efficiency. The challenge was to introduce innovation while preserving the tradition of French bakeries.

Geneva Airport, the second-largest airport in Switzerland, has been experiencing an influx of passengers, necessitating its expansion. With only one runway, it serves 15 million passengers annually, a number expected to rise to over 25 million by 2030. This increase in traffic makes it essential to preserve the quality of the passenger experience at the airport. To accommodate its growing demand, Geneva Airport has been upgrading its infrastructure and renovating its terminals, cargo holds, and hangers. Alongside, the airport is improving its electrical distribution system. However, electrical renovation can create disruption, which can be critical in an airport as it not only creates delays for passengers but also impacts cargo and emergency operations where downtime is not an option.

The Redfern Substation, a critical part of the Sydney Trains network, was running on aging equipment that needed to be upgraded. The substation, built in 1970, had limited space available for upgrades. The location of the switch room was directly above a platform at a critical station on the Sydney Trains Network, meaning any work would impact the schedule of regular commuter trains. The upgrade needed to be completed within a three-day period, making the logistics for an upgrade even more challenging.

Sinopec Hainan Petrochemical needed to digitize its processes to improve the plant’s operation and maintenance levels. Prior to that, projects often deployed control systems from different vendors which was not conducive to the efficient development, maintenance, management, and upgrade of the systems, and made digital operation and maintenance scenarios, such as centralized monitoring of all field data, seem out of reach. Nowadays, cost along with operational and maintenance considerations have led companies to prefer integrated bidding for joint installations. This was the case with Hainan Refining & Chemical and the reason that they looked for a main automation system supplier with strong engineering capabilities and a complete DCS, supported by a safety system.

ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel producer, was facing issues with its aging electrical installation at its Train 2 facility in Belval, Luxembourg. The company was looking for solutions to reduce downtime risks, improve safety, and enable energy monitoring. It also wanted to modernize its MV power network in line with its sustainability commitments. The project included retrofitting unused but outdated MV switchgear and disposal of old parts in compliance with environmental regulations.

Bolloré Logistics, a French logistics giant, is a strong advocate for sustainability and has rolled out its 'Powering Sustainable Logistics' program in 2018. The program aims to reduce the environmental impact of Bolloré Logistics’ activities. As part of this initiative, Bolloré Logistics built the Blue Hub, a green building equipped with an advanced energy management system and other eco-friendly features. However, achieving tangible sustainability benchmarks required to obtain environmental certifications such as Green Mark & LEED was a challenge. The company needed a solution that would help them reduce their carbon footprint and make their operations more energy-efficient.With the effects of global warming felt worldwide, companies around the globe have been trying their best to reduce their carbon footprint. The logistics industry has also followed suit, environmentally friendly packaging and carbon emission reduction of freight shipping are the many ways employed as part of its efforts to go green. Bolloré Logistics wanted to go the extra mile by ensuring that Blue Hub is energy-efficient.

The Shedd Aquarium, a national historic landmark in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., first opened its doors to visitors in 1930. Today almost 2 million guests visit this national historic landmark annually. The aquatic environments in the original aquarium contain more than 1.5 million gallons of water, including a 90,000-gallon exhibit created in 1971 to reproduce a Caribbean coral reef. Over the years the aquarium has undergone expansions to accommodate other large exhibits, more than doubling its original size to cover 422,000 square feet. A facility this size has multiple challenges with regard to energy use in maintaining diverse environments for visitors, staff, and more than 32,500 aquatic animals. In 2013, decision-makers committed to an ambitious goal of cutting the aquarium’s energy consumption in half by 2020. This commitment to sustainability extends into every part of Shedd Aquarium — from water-conserving exhibits and energy-efficient lighting to green gardens and the food its inhabitants eat.

EEC Engie, an electric distribution utility based in New Caledonia, has a zero-carbon strategy. The company wants to remove the SF6 gas from its network. The remote island location presents difficult and unique challenges for EEC Engie. New Caledonia is halfway around the world from Engie’s French operations base. This means that EEC Engie not only needs to manage the purchasing part of its business, but also logistics and the complexity of transportation -- all of which must be taken into account in order to be efficient. Recycling SF6 is also complicated in New Caledonia because the island does not currently have channels for reprocessing SF6. The medium has been used in electrical equipment for decades. While it is very effective for insulating and breaking, it is also harmful to the environment because it is a potent greenhouse gas.