Category: Success Stories

Headquartered in Genoa, Italy, Ansaldo Energia is
a leading manufacturer of power plants and power
generation equipment such as coal and gas turbines.
The company has built over 100 power plants and 300
gas turbines around the world and provides remote
monitoring services and maintenance solutions for
customers in 35 countries.

In Finland, one of the world’s northernmost countries,
where winters are long and exceptionally cold,
keeping the power on is vitally important. Helen
Sähköverkko Oy, which distributes electricity to
400,000 customers in Helsinki, Finland, takes this
job seriously. Helen Sähköverkko Oy is Finland’s
third-largest electricity distribution system operator
(DSO); it’s part of the Helen Group owned by the city.
When Helen Sähköverkko Oy needed more insight
into SCADA measurements, it turned to the PI System
in 2011 to replace an in-house EMS data historian.
The company soon realized the PI System had the
power to deliver on more than just data visibility.

The nuclear power industry faces constant pressure
from other energy sectors like natural gas and
renewable energy. Both offer customers cost-effective
alternatives to nuclear energy without the safety
risks that come from nuclear accidents. As the largest
nuclear operator in the United States, Exelon was well
aware of these constraints but hindered by its inability
to identify and diagnose issues in real time. The PI
System transformed the company’s diagnostic process,
helping engineers and operators make good decisions
quickly based on a shared set of automatically
collected data. Thanks to the PI System, Exelon’s staff
can now focus on analysis and decision-making, rather
than on data collection.

When some of the most devastating fires in California’s
history ravaged the state in 2017 and 2018, Santa
Rosa Junior College (SRJC) already understood the
importance of sustainable energy production. The
intensity of the fires, widely thought to be aggravated
by climate change, only deepened the Northern
California school’s commitment to become a zeronet-energy facility and achieve carbon-neutral
operations by 2030.

In the pharmaceutical world, R&D can sometimes mean
“redundancy and duplication” instead of “research and
development.” Shire (now Takeda), a biopharmaceutical
company that focuses on rare diseases and specialty
conditions, used AVEVA PI System to increase
efficiency and improve the bottom line by eliminating
the need for researchers to keep data in individual
spreadsheets. As a result, the company was able to
conduct more research without increasing staffing –
putting it one step closer to cures that could help people
around the world. “You have these highly trained, highly
educated employees that you’re paying hundreds
of thousands of dollars, and they’re sitting at their
computer wondering what the pH value for a reactor
was,” said Brad Ebel, manager of pilot plant operations
at Shire. “It’s ludicrous to be doing that.” Thanks to
AVEVA PI System, these workers can now put their time
to better use.