Schneider Electric Announces PlantStruxure Platform

Schneider Electric announced its PlantStruxure architecture, a collaborative system that allows industrial and infrastructure companies to meet their automation needs and at the same time deliver on growing energy management requirements. The system offers flexible, scalable and collaborative architectures that are the building blocks for manufacturing and process within Schneider Electric's comprehensive EcoStruxure energy management architecture portfolio. EcoStruxure allows organizations to improve energy efficiencies across multiple domains of business including process automation, says Schneider.

"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," said Michel Crochon, Executive Vice President, Industry Business, Schneider Electric. "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 allows 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. PlantStruxure enables high process availability and offers redundancy and functional safety at each level of the architecture, to meet the requirements of industries such as oil & gas, chemical, petrochemical, power and mining.

"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 environment encompassing production management, energy management and control systems functions as well as business information," said Crochon.

Craig Resnick, Research Director, ARC Advisory Group, authored the white paper "Schneider Electric Deploys New PlantStruxure Platform." "Conventional approaches to process automation and operations management are evolving as processors and manufacturers demand enhanced visualization, intelligence, control and agility, which requires increased power and energy management capabilities," according to Resnick.

"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."