Azalys, a waste treatment plant in Carrières-sous-Poissy, France, needed to modernize its electrical system while ensuring continuous service for local communities. The plant, which serves an area inhabited by almost 300,000 people, treats 125,000 metric tons of waste and produces 40 GWh of electricity per year. The plant incinerates non-recyclable waste and transforms the heat into steam, which is then converted by a turbo alternator into energy. Some of this energy is consumed by the site itself, while the rest is sold to the electricity distribution network Enedis. The health of the electrical equipment is crucial to the plant’s mission. The modernization process had to be as swift as possible in order not to interrupt the service provided to the local communities.

HSBC Place, an office building in downtown Edmonton, was aging and its mechanical and electrical equipment had reached the end of its useful life. The building had no amenities or visual interest, and it was facing competition from other premier office spaces in Edmonton’s Financial District. The building’s new owners, Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo), and the Epic Investment management team saw an opportunity to transform the building into a modern, sustainable tower that would be relevant for the next 20 years. They wanted to create a building that was not only aesthetically pleasing but also sustainable and equipped with modern amenities. The challenge was to overhaul the building in less than two years and make it compete with other premier downtown buildings.

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.

Carrefour Egypt, a leading mega-retailer, operates in a highly competitive retail market. To differentiate itself, the company focuses on customer satisfaction by improving quality, choice, and prices. As part of its strategy, Carrefour Egypt is committed to sustainable business practices. Jean-Luc Graziato, the country head for Carrefour Egypt at Majid Al Futtaim Retail, implemented a project to reduce power consumption and ensure uptime in about half of all Carrefour stores. The key goals included measuring energy consumption across stores to identify high- and low-performing stores, using insights from energy dashboards and performance reports to continually optimize power usage, ensuring protection against downtime threats, such as equipment malfunctions or power outages, via timely notifications, and maximizing uptime for power, lighting, ovens, refrigerators, and other business-critical assets.

Veolia Water Technologies, a global provider of water and wastewater services and solutions, was contracted to build a water treatment facility on the Sorrento coast, Italy. The situation was serious as more than half of the population was discharging waste directly into the sea, and the other half into a treatment facility that did not comply with regulations. These challenges drove Veolia to design a state-of-the-art solution for their plant at Punta Gradelle. With sustainability being one of their key values, Veolia’s plan was not only to treat wastewater, but to also do it sustainably, reusing the recovered material for industrial and irrigation purposes. To realize these ambitions, they needed an advanced supervision system that could provide insights for efficient management across the facility as well as individual operating units.

Nestlé Waters, the world leader in bottled water, operates a factory in Vergèze, France, where it manufactures its iconic Perrier brand. The factory has 13 production lines and an installation comprising several hundred meters of pipes. To ensure the high quality of Perrier water, Nestlé Waters needed a clean-in-place (CIP) process that meets best-in-class standards. Traditional cleaning performed during a period of machine shutdown represented 20% of the working time of the facility and impacted operational efficiency. Nestlé Waters was looking for a solution that would help them win back some time for production while maintaining product quality and compliance with food safety regulations.

DigiPlex, a leading data center operator in the Nordics, is dedicated to responsible, sustainable growth. However, the power-intensive nature of data centers presents a formidable challenge for the company. As society grows more connected every day, data centers are sources of enormous power consumption. This presents a formidable challenge for colocation providers like DigiPlex in Norway, which seeks to grow in a competitive business environment while being a responsible corporate citizen. DigiPlex views operating green data centers as crucial to business growth and survival. The company believes that in the future, if a data center is not operated in a completely renewable, sustainable manner, it won't survive in the industry.

Nestlé Nescafé, the world’s largest soluble coffee factory, faced a significant challenge with unplanned stoppages disrupting production. In one year, the factory experienced eight unplanned stoppages, which had a significant impact on production efficiency and costs. The factory, located in Toluca, Mexico, produces one million jars of coffee every day, and any disruption in the production process can have a significant financial impact. The factory operates 365 days a year, and any unplanned stoppage can impact the reliability of the processes and affect what makes it to grocery shelves. In 2013, Nestlé invested approximately $125 million to expand this plant, increasing production by 40% and making it the largest soluble coffee facility in the world. At this scale, even modest gains to energy efficiency and service improvements translate to sizable cost savings. Improving the reliability of the facility’s electrical equipment would deliver the productivity, efficiency, and maintenance benefits Nestlé sought.

Mulino Marino, a family-run mill in northern Italy, recognized the need to increase its production to keep up with growing demand. The changes in consumer tastes and purchasing behavior in recent decades presented new challenges: How to be more attentive to market demands for more sustainability, traceability, and organics, as well as to increased requests for alternative multigrain and multi-seed flours, which required the development of new recipes, processes, and products. These challenges, coupled with a dearth of experience and expertise amongst the younger generation of workers, highlighted the need to incorporate new technologies. The company’s strong sustainability ethos and its concern for a depleted earth also drove it to invest in energy management solutions such as solar panels, with the rest of its energy requirements coming from other renewable sources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Berto Coffee Roaster, a leading company in Indonesia’s food processing sector, recognized a huge opportunity in the local coffee industry and decided to focus on building high-quality coffee roasting machines. However, their existing roasting machine was manually controlled and required a skilled operator to check every step, resulting in a lot of wasted time in the production process. With the arrival of Industry 4.0, the market demanded a fully automated coffee roaster that required minimal operation and low maintenance costs while also increasing production output, quality, and consistency. It became critical for Berto Coffee Roaster to add more value to their roasting machines designed for the export market.

E.ON, the largest energy distribution network in Sweden, is committed to improving its service level, minimizing network interruptions, and ensuring a reliable, continuous power supply. The company is also focused on making energy distribution more environmentally friendly while maintaining high efficiency and reliability. E.ON's sustainability objectives include becoming fossil fuel-free by 2025 and reducing the risk of greenhouse gas emissions. To move towards a more sustainable, greener distribution network, E.ON decided to explore the possibility of replacing their SF6 gas-insulated switchgear with a more environmentally friendly, SF6-free technology. The new solution needed to comply with the energy transition happening in Sweden, ensure greater personnel safety, and be interoperable with existing equipment.

GreenAlp, the electric distribution network operator in Grenoble, France, serves over 120,000 customers, including residential and electro-intensive industrial customers. The company is committed to being green and innovative, but as a mid-size electrical company, it does not have the capacity for its own research center. It relies on local actors and advancements in the industry. GreenAlp has 6 main electrical substations of 225,000 volts or 63,000 volts which transform into 20,000 volts and especially 750 MV/LV substations. These MV/LV substations have aging equipment that constantly needs renewing. One of GreenAlp’s aims for this project is to learn how it can renew its existing switchgear in the future. Service continuity has been one of GreenAlp’s main challenges. It needs real-time knowledge of the network, which can be challenging.

Flückiger Électricité, a specialist in electrical installations and engineering based in Switzerland, was looking to expand its services to include maintenance. The company needed a tool to manage this new service offering. They wanted to offer additional services and win new clients without investing in expensive solutions and time-consuming training. One of their customers, watch manufacturer G&F Châtelain, was looking for a maintenance partner. They wanted to choose a company that had set up the electrical installation and could provide visibility into the maintenance schedule.

The Bainbridge Island School District, located on a beautiful island in Puget Sound, is a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle, Washington. The district provides a world-class education to 4,000 children in grades K through 12. However, the district's network’s system uptime is often challenged by the inclement weather that often passes over the island. The area experiences many storms with winds that reach 40 to 50+ miles per hour. When that happens, power outages are almost guaranteed. The island is very wooded, so power lines are at risk when trees and branches fall. The district experiences about 10–15 storms per year and these usually generate about 12 power outages a year. Flickering power levels (brownouts) are frequent and these also disrupt the uptime of the critical computer assets. With such a widespread and distributed network to manage, and with limited human resources, the district needed a simple and reliable way to remotely monitor system issues.

Oxford Energy Solutions Inc., a Canadian company, has been designing and building refrigeration equipment for various sectors since 2006. The refrigeration sector is relatively conservative, with many facilities still running systems that were installed 50 years ago. Maintenance is usually done reactively by replacing broken parts like valves and compressors without addressing bigger issues. Oxford Energy wanted to change the way refrigeration systems are built and maintained in line with its ethos of energy conservation and sustainability. The company was looking for a flexible, holistic platform that would enable it to bring its vision of control and integration to the market.

Renault Group, a multinational automobile manufacturer, is transforming its Flins, France factory into the first European circular economy plant dedicated to mobility. The goal is to achieve a negative CO2 balance at the plant by 2030. However, the company faces challenges such as power reliability and cybersecurity. Any power supply failure can cause a major critical event that can have serious consequences for the site’s activity. An outage can cause safety risks, halt the manufacturing process, which can lead to vehicle damage, cause financial losses due to the vehicle damage, and result in late deliveries to customers. In addition, Renault Group must focus on improving cybersecurity because a cyber breach could be devastating to the Flins factory’s operations.

Leading Edge Data Centres wanted to bring stable, reliable, cost-effective connectivity to regional Australia. The company needed a technology partner that could design and build a reliable prefabricated and certified edge data centre, which could be replicated quickly in multiple regional sites around Australia. The team was also looking for a company that could provide a network of engineers to support these sites into the future. A huge challenge for Leading Edge Data Centres is that the distance between its sites makes cost-effective, in-person monitoring almost impossible. Furthermore, most of its sites are greenfield locations, and as a result, power infrastructure is limited. For these reasons, it needed a reliable solution, backup redundancies, and remote access. Leading Edge Data Centres also required an energy monitoring system to accurately track and report in real time the usage of hundreds of customers.

CVC Technologies, a leading pharmaceutical packaging machine company, was looking to introduce digitization into their production processes to provide the best manufacturing equipment for customers. They aimed to increase their solutions to customers, reduce downtime, increase efficiency, and minimize human errors. The company was focused on introducing new packaging equipment to meet the changing needs of their customers. Their customers needed a fast and reliable way to contact CVC or the plant technicians if there were any issues with machinery or general problems.

Wilo Pumps Indonesia was tasked with designing and delivering a full dewatering system to help prevent future flooding events for a mining company. One of the main challenges that Wilo needed to tackle was the lack of access to the site. Its remote location makes inspecting, repairing, and maintaining the pump system extremely time consuming so the ability to monitor and control it remotely was vital. A smart pump and water management system with remote monitoring capabilities would be the answer to the customer’s requirements as it would also reduce operating costs while improving the reliability and security of the mining operation.

Oracle Corporation, a leading supplier of information management software, required a reliable power system for its thousands of software developers and customers that depend on non-stop, 24-hour-a-day technical support. Power interruptions could result in significant losses in sales and productivity, as well as affecting customers with mission-critical support needs. Oracle's need for reliable power was the driving force behind setting up its own substation, a 13 MW electrical distribution system, and a power management system. The company initially considered purchasing electricity from the local utility at primary voltage, 12 kV, also known as voltage buy-up. However, the utility feeder to Oracle would still be shared with residential and other non-industrial loads, and they would be subjected to several outages per year. Instead, Oracle decided to intercept the 60 kV circuit from the utility’s transmission line that passes over the Oracle campus. Since the 60 kV circuit’s unplanned outage rate proved to be more reliable, at less than one event per five years, and payback was favorable, Oracle’s board of directors approved the project and construction began.

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.

Schneider Electric, a leader in energy management and automation, faced the challenge of enhancing productivity and sustainability through innovative solutions. The company sought to leverage Generative AI to transform its internal operations and empower its customers. The collaboration with Microsoft aimed to create solutions that streamline time-consuming tasks, optimize resource allocation, and improve efficiency. Schneider Electric needed to integrate advanced AI capabilities to stay at the forefront of technological innovation and achieve sustainable growth.