At the first annual Aveva PI World digital conference, marking the first PI World event since Aveva’s acquisition of OSIsoft in 2020, representatives from both companies explained their shared path forward.
According to Peter Herweck, CEO of Aveva, PI System’s cloud-based data management platform will help companies using Aveva’s process applications and services optimize their production operations at a much larger scale. The PI System is key to this goal in that it provides end users with a single, unified system of records that can span numerous facilities and geographic locations.
This level of scaling has become increasingly necessary as rapid shifts in demand, unreliable supply chains, and rising material costs are driving companies to increase their flexibility and efficiency.
“Surprisingly, much of the value that end-users were looking to attain in 1990 is the same kind of value they’re looking to attain today. The biggest difference is scale and scope. One of the big things we’ve noticed is that the scale and scope really affect the value of the system,” said J. Patrick Kennedy, OSIsoft founder and chairman emeritus. “If you had a company with 100 plants and you put a certain amount of data collection in one plant, then you’d get a certain amount of value out of it. But if you take that same amount of data collection and distribute it evenly among all 100 plants, the potential payout is much, much larger. The bigger the scale, the bigger the potential value.”
OSIsoft, along with its PI System platform, was acquired by Aveva largely to help fuel this optimization at scale. Because the PI System can synchronize the aggregation and analysis of data, it vastly increases scalability. Not only can useful information be made available to plant floor workers more easily, but the larger data reservoir accessible to IT can help drive a business’s optimization of production, maintenance, and overall supply chain planning. Moreover, as a vendor-neutral data management platform, PI System can be used with software from Aveva or a third-party provider, eliminating issues with compatibility and integration.
