Innovation leadership recognised.

Seeq is a finalist of a 2023 Geo and Global AWS Partner Award, recognizing leaders around the globe playing a key role helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Geo and Global AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of AWS Partners, whose business models have embraced specialization, innovation, and cooperation over the past year. Geo and Global AWS Partner Awards recognize partners whose business models continue to evolve and thrive on AWS as they work with customers.

Seeq enables industrial companies to accelerate digital transformation outcomes such as operational excellence and profitability, workforce upskilling, and sustainability, with a self-service advanced analytics and industrial AI platform that can access and leverage vast amounts of historically underused data. By combining AWS’s secure cloud services with the Seeq platform, organizations can easily access all the time series and relational data stored in AWS data services and leverage joint solutions to optimize production and improve operational excellence. The Seeq Solution for Amazon Lookout for Equipment, for example, helps shared customers streamline deployment, accelerating process experts’ time to value for predictive maintenance use cases.

“Seeq is thrilled to be awarded this distinction for our work with AWS in enabling the digital transformation of manufacturing and industrial organizations around the globe,” says Dr. Lisa Graham, Chief Executive Officer at Seeq. “As a 2023 finalist for Industry Partner of the Year - Manufacturing & Industrial - Global, Seeq can help shared customers make time series data insights available to all stakeholders for improved manufacturing outcomes. This recognition from AWS validates our advanced analytics market leadership and commitment to driving customer value through innovation.”

"By leveraging Seeq on AWS, we have lowered the cost of curiosity and reduced the barrier to explore new opportunities for our process experts," said Jesse Karkheck, Remote Process Monitoring Subject Matter Expert, Operations Performance Group at Guardian Industries. "Our team is empowered with the capabilities to rapidly view, test, iterate and understand our operational time series data like never before, providing the agility and flexibility we need to prioritize issues in real time. As a result, we've experienced significant time and cost savings while driving operational excellence."

For the first year, finalists were recognized as part of the data-driven award categories, which were comprised of a unique set of metrics that helped measure AWS Partners’ performance within the past year. The datasets used were audited by a third-party vendor, Canalys, to ensure that all measurements and calculations were objective and correct in nature. Finalists represent the top 3 ranked AWS Partners across any data-driven award set.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a global program focused on helping companies build successful AWS-based businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. The APN includes independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world, with AWS Partner participation growing significantly during the past 12 months.

A panel of AWS experts selected the finalists based on strict criteria with a third-party audit conducted by Canalys. Seeq has been named a finalist for the Industry Partner of the Year - Manufacturing & Industrial - Global, recognizing top AWS Partners with the AWS Manufacturing and Industrial Competency who provide solutions supporting several categories including Engineering and Design, Smart Manufacturing, Smart Product and Services, Enterprise Solutions, Operational Technology Security, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability, and Operational Technology for an end-to-end value chain.

Seeq on AWS can be procured in AWS Marketplace, which simplifies the procurement process and provides incentives for enterprise customers through the AWS Enterprise Discount Program. In addition, all AWS Marketplace sellers are verified as ‘ready-to-run’ on AWS, expediting the implementation process. This streamlined approach to technology deployment enables companies using Seeq to quickly and easily realize the benefits of advanced analytics.

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• Seeq has also achieved the AWS Energy Competency in 2021 and AWS Life Sciences Competency in 2022.

• See also: High-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure for industry recognised.(17/4/2023) and:  Advanced analytics.(5/12/2019)

@SeeqCorporation @awscloud #PAuto #Manufacturing

Brazil's ecological transformation plan.

The Government of Brazil launched its Ecological Transformation Plan at COP28 in a presentation by the Finance Minister, Fernando Haddad with The Minister for Environment and Climate, Marina Silva; the President of the BRICS Bank and former President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff; the President of the Brazilian Development Bank, Aloizio Mercadante; the President of the of the Inter-American Development Bank, Ilan Goldfajn; and the Secretary for Climate, Energy and Environment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago.

The plan challenges development paradigms by envisioning a new role for the Global South in the contemporary world. It is a proposal that presents the region as the center of the green economy by advocating for environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive globalization.

" ...interrupt five centuries of extractivism and environmental destruction to position Brazil at the forefront of sustainable development!"

In his presentation, Minister Haddad stated that initial studies from the private sector indicate that ecological transformation could generate 7.5 to 10 million jobs across all sectors, with a focus on the bioeconomy, agriculture, and infrastructure segments, as well as income-generating opportunities.

However, to realize this scenario, the same studies estimate that Brazil needs additional investments in the range of $130 to $160 billion per year over the next decade. The investments should occur mainly in infrastructure to promote adaptations, produce energy, enhance industrialization, and improve mobility.

Minister Haddad praised Brazil's ability to mobilize investment and create sustainable infrastructure through public investments. He cited national examples that make the country "a giant in renewable energy," highlighting the network of hydroelectric plants, the unified electrical system, ethanol production, and the role of Petrobras and other leading national companies in the research and development of biofuels.

Citing examples of implementation measures, the minister referred to the creation of a regulated carbon market, the issuance of sustainable sovereign bonds, the definition of a national taxonomy focused on sustainability, and the revision of the Climate Fund. The initiatives aim to create conditions for a new wave of investments with the goal of concentrating industrial technologies, modernizing science, and qualifying the workforce nationally.

Advancements.
"The Ecological Transformation Plan that I have the honor to present to you today aims to unite forces around a historic goal: to interrupt five centuries of extractivism and environmental destruction to position Brazil at the forefront of sustainable development," declared Minister Haddad.

Haddad announced advancements in key areas for the ecological transformation of the Brazilian economy, achieved by the current administration since the minister attended the COP in Egypt last year. One of them was the nearly 50% reduction in deforestation in the Amazon due to the reactivation of prevention and control actions in the biome.

The minister listed the recently approved Bills on green hydrogen and offshore wind energy generation by the National Congress as crucial sectors for the energy transition that hold enormous potential for the country. Brazil also revised the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to achieve a 53% reduction in emission levels compared to the year 2005, a climate goal more ambitious than that of many developed countries.

"The Ecological Transformation Plan is an evolutionary process, just like the challenge of climate change. It will seek to adapt to new paradigms and develop public policies to address not only past problems but also those of the future," added Haddad, who classified the plan as a realistic yet ambitious model for the reinvention of Brazil.

Joint Statement by Brazil and UAE on COP28 to COP30 Nature-Climate Partnership.

At the COP28 World Climate Action Summit, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates announced a bilateral partnership to strengthen dual nature and climate action between COP28 and COP30.

They underscored their shared commitment to address the interlinked challenges of climate change and biodiversity and ecosystem loss, emphasizing the urgency and complementarity of implementing the UN Convention on Climate Change, its Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The Presidents also highlighted that the partnership will focus on enhancing local livelihoods and supporting the development goals of indigenous and traditional peoples.

The cooperation builds on the UAE and Brazil’s Memorandum of Understanding signed in April 2023 and will include several priorities, such as:

• Tropical and mangrove forest protection, conservation, and restoration;
• Scaling innovative financial mechanisms for nature, including the new Tropical Forest Forever mechanism to finance standing forest;
• Finance and policy for local and indigenous communities, women, and youth related to climate and nature action;
• Global synergies between national strategies under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Both countries also welcomed the opportunity to work closely in support of Brazil’s G20 Presidency in 2024, as well the incoming presidencies of UNFCCC COP29 and CBD COP16.

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@COP28_UAE @_Enviro_News #PAuto #Environment #Brazil

OT and IT.

The convergence of IT and OT monitoring.

The Centreon 23.10 software release among multiple enhancements, significantly simplifies the monitoring of industrial and edge environments by leveraging Raspberry Pi, a robust mini server on which a monitoring poller can run. This new application enables unprecedented visibility into industrial processes, assets, and infrastructure while reducing the cost and complexity of monitoring.

New dashboard interface

Simplifying IT and OT monitoring convergence for organizations.
Operational technologies (OT) are increasingly connected to business applications running in the data center or in the cloud, so these environments must now be monitored with the same care as IT environments. But until now, there has been no easy way to do this.

In the context of IT and OT convergence, energy, transportation, utilities, and manufacturing organizations can now easily monitor IT and OT operations using Centreon software and a simple, portable, and readily available device.

"The introduction of this new capability demonstrates Centreon's commitment to providing versatile, robust solutions tailored to the specific needs of industrial environments. By integrating compatibility with Raspberry Pi, we are paving the way for more flexible and powerful industrial applications. This innovation underscores our vision of limitless monitoring as a performance enabler, not only in the context of IT, but also OT," said Julien Mathis, Centreon’s CEO.

Latest software release holds additional enhancements.

In addition to Raspberry Pi compatibility, the new Centreon 23.10 release includes several key enhancements:

• New Dashboard User Interface: The new dashboard interface provides a more intuitive and flexible user experience. It makes it easy to create customized dashboards by selecting a template from a variety of graphical widgets.
• Additional Views for Resource Status: Centreon's Resource Status interface provides more flexibility in visualizing resource status alerts, making it easier and faster to identify the root cause of problems.
• New Rest APIs for Complete Automation: Centreon's Rest APIs provide the ability to automate the platform's advanced remote access configuration and management tasks, giving users and developers greater automation and control over their monitoring systems.

These latest enhancements are in line with Centreon's mission to provide state-of-the-art IT monitoring solutions that enable more efficient management and better data analysis. By combining IT and OT, Centreon is raising the bar for industrial monitoring, helping organizations with complex operations achieve performance and operational excellence.

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@Centreon #PAuto #IT

A tear at COP23.

Not strictly speaking an automation story but the environment is important to all of us and this story highlights part of the struggle in the defence of our world.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was listed as the keynote speaker at a COP28 session entitled: ‘Protecting Nature for Climate, Lives and Livelihood’. However, amid cheers and rapturous applause from the audience, Lula took the stage accompanied by his Minister for Environment and Climate, Marina Silva… and handed her the microphone.

Marina Silva and President Lula da Silva

“I could not speak about forests without Marina,” Lula explained. “She was born in a forest, and was not literate until sixteen years of age, and yet, here she is - responsible for the dramatic environmental success that Brazil has achieved since my election! So, yes this is my speech, but Marina is the best person to deliver it from the heart!”

At this point, the President was clearly moved and there was a tear in his eye as a wave of emotion washed over the people in the audience, many of whom were also brought to tears. Those of us that regularly witness political speeches are not accustomed to such genuine, heartfelt shows of emotion, but for many of us it was very refreshing!

Highlighting the significance of Brazil’s recent achievements, a few minutes before Lula and Silva took the stage, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said: “Brazil’s success in reducing deforestation is the most important climate news this year.”

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More on Brazil's Ecological Transformation Plan.

@COP28_UAE @_Enviro_News #PAuto #Environment #Brazil

Digitalised production simulated.

Digitalised production processes can be simulated in detail on a small scale with fischertechnik’s revolutionary Agile Production Simulation, for instance with a driverless transport system and quality control using artificial intelligence (AI). The compact simulation model provides a unique opportunity to learn about and simulate future technologies using a hands-on approach.

The factory of the future has been the subject of many research projects in science and the industry. Future-oriented companies are relying on automation, modularity, artificial intelligence and agility to remain competitive. In order to advance these topics in the industry and research, students, apprentices and members of staff require the corresponding skills and awareness to handle complex issues. This is where the Agile Production Simulation learning concept comes in. It simulates processes such as quality control using artificial intelligence or driverless transport systems on a small scale, recreating automated processes from incoming goods to modular production and quality control. The accompanying educational material translates the hands-on simulated processes into future skills for learners. The model’s digital twin significantly enhances the learning experience.

The Quality Control with AI module from fischertechnik’s Agile Production Simulation facility makes the complex topic of machine learning tangible while demonstrating its uses in a production environment. The model will soon be available for anyone who wants to get to grips with the factory of the future.

Agile Production Simulation is a factory consisting of flexible and combinable modules. Starting at the incoming raw goods, the material flow passes through an automated high-bay warehouse, various production stations such as a milling or drilling station and AI quality control to the outgoing goods. A driverless transport system (DTS) with omniwheels transports workpieces between the individual stations, ensuring an agile production process tailored to customer needs. The DTS can be charged at a charging point without changing batteries, if required.

Each workpiece contains an NFC tag where the production data is recorded for digital traceability. The factory produces workpieces in different colours with various processing features. Agile production enables product-specific manufacturing steps within a lean process without the need for set-up time.

Agile Production Simulation is controlled by a central control system (Raspberry Pi 4 Model B) connected to the controllers of the individual factory modules, SPS Siemens S7 1200. Various communication protocols, such as the MQTT protocol (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), allow the modules to connect and work together.

Cloud-based real-time monitoring provides dashboards to control processes and visualise the factory status. It can also determine KPIs such as cycle times and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). An online store simulates the customer’s workpiece order process. A moveable camera can be controlled via the dashboard to simulate the principle of remote maintenance.

The Quality Control with AI module makes the complex topic of machine learning tangible while demonstrating its uses in a production environment. Based on the concept of supervised learning, the machine learning modules are implemented with the AI tool Tensorflow.

Agile Production Simulation was developed in cooperation with experts from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the software company OMM Solutions GmbH and the University of Stuttgart. The model will soon be available for anyone who wants to get to grips with the factory of the future.

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@fischertechnik #PAuto #Design #Manufacturing

Business fields restructuring announced.

steute Technologies has announced a comprehensive restructuring of its business fields.

The company will now appear on the market with three divisions: Meditec, Leantec and Controltec. These new divisions are the result of a strategic repositioning in order to meet the current demands of the market and to provide a clearer orientation for customers.

• In its Meditec division, steute develops and produces user interfaces for medical devices in the OR and diagnostics. steute also su.pports customers worldwide with the complex approval process for medical products. An additional focus of the Meditec division is the realisation of interoperability according to the concept of Service-oriented Device Connectivity (SDC).

• Leantec is the new division for digital shop floor solutions. With its own "nexy" brand, it facilitates the realisation of intelligent Industry 4.0 communication networks for optimal material flow management. A full service is offered – from planning and implementation to maintenance.

• The Controltec division includes all top-quality switches and sensors for machine and plant engineering from the former business fields Extreme, Automation and Industrial Wireless. All products on the Controltec website are available from its integrated steute Online Shop.

The restructuring of the company and its divisions is accompanied by a new website design in twelve languages. From the new corporate website, which presents the company and its umbrella brand with the claim "Applied Intelligence", visitors can access the individual websites of the three new divisions.

With these changes, .steute is reinforcing its market position and underlining its commitment to innovation, customer orientation and technological excellence.

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@mepaxIntPR #steute #Manufacturing #Pauto #Automation

Automation, electrical and digital solutions for LNG plant.

Bechtel Energy has instructed ABB to deliver integrated automation, electrical and digital solutions for Phase 1 of the Rio Grande LNG facility (RGLNG Phase 1) in Brownsville (TX USA), a project developed by NextDecade Corporation. Bechtel Energy Inc. is undertaking construction of RGLNG Phase 1 under an engineering, procurement, and construction contract.

RGLNG Phase 1 includes three liquefaction trains and supporting infrastructure, and was the largest greenfield project financing in U.S. history, according to NextDecade Corporation. This order, booked in Q3 2023, marks ABB’s first fully-integrated scope on a major LNG facility. When fully operational, Phase 1 of the facility is expected to produce 17.6 million tons per annum of LNG.

“Innovation and collaboration are helping address the energy trilemma of providing affordable, accessible and sustainable energy for all,” said Brandon Spencer, President of ABB Energy Industries. “ABB technology will automate, electrify and digitalize the Rio Grande project, which will further boost global LNG exports and play a vital role in achieving global energy security.”

RGLNG Phase 1 will utilize ABB products and services to ensure the safe and efficient operation of its LNG production. Automation control systems, digital electrification components and industrial drives will enable RGLNG Phase 1 to optimize production assets, increase energy efficiency and operate more sustainably.

According to the International Energy Agency[1], the U.S. is set to consolidate its position as the world’s largest LNG exporter and growth in LNG supply signals a shift to a more globalized gas marketplace to improve resiliency and the ability to respond to supply and demand shocks.

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@ABBgroupnews @abbindustryserv @abb_automation @admiralpr #PAuto #USA