From the state-of-the-art of the current Digital Transformation to BaxEnergy Digitalization
A contemporary picture…
People screaming on the phone while they are stuck in the traffic or talking with the peeled tomato’s boxes at the supermarket. Women in trouble because they lost the phone with their entire arm in the bottom of their shopping bag. Managers who would feel lost without their tablets and super lightweight laptops because those became the technological extension of their “Superego”. And then, an ordinary morning, your 3 years old son wakes up, takes your smartphone with the same ease we took paper, pen and inkwell in our old times, and has already downloaded his favourite app and sent you the screenshot of the handheld or video game that you will buy for him.
If you lose the trends of the day your network is talking about you are out, if you don’t share your geographic positioning you are nowhere, if you don’t show the best image of you, you are nobody. The logic of the “Minimum Effort, Maximum Result” makes your life easier and controls everything: just say “Hey!” and your friend AI device has already turned off the lights of the bedroom and set the alarm, wishing you “Sweet Dreams”. And here we are, plunged into “Her”. It is not just a super-prized movie, it is the reality.
How AI and ML are changing our World
People talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) everywhere we look. According to AI experts, everything from our jobs, to the food we eat, to whatever we drink, to the software we write will be affected. ML and AI are having a huge impact on our lives and their roles are only increasing.
Apple has been the first major tech company to integrate a smart assistant into its operating system. There is an Apple Brain and it’s already inside our iPhone. Huawei has just answered to Apple launching Mate 10 Pro with built-in AI and with the already popular slogan “Unlock the future with the real AI Phone!”. Google engineers are in the midst of ninja-training in ML. Machine Learning is a transformative way by which we’re rethinking how we are doing everything.
Pedro Domingo, author of the popular ML Manifesto The Master Algorithm, writes “ML is a technology that builds itself”. This is something totally different from traditional coding. Even the process has changed: after identifying the right data and choosing the right conditions for the success, then we should trust the systems. Isn’t that the hardest part for coders?!
ML is considered as much art as science. Life is everything we have been learning not coded. We didn’t learn to talk from a linguist, but from hearing other people talking. We are resorting to ML for many uses and requirements: language translation, image recognition, to predict parking difficulty or traffic etc.
AI and IoT are inextricably interconnected. AI is like our brain, making sense of the data and deciding what actions to perform. And the connected devices and IoT sensors are like our bodies: they provide the raw data of what’s going on in the World and make workspace, environments and even entire buildings smarter and more efficient. ML has been prioritized by the companies which drive the tech-industry, as Google, FB and Amazon.
Mouse and graphics interfaces made computers accessible. Touch screens improved the UX, making computers everyday tools. Interfaces powered by ML will make computing omnipresent.
What does “Mobile – first” concept mean?
The new mobile businesses have recently built web apps for use on large screens. “Mobile-first” thinking is not just about devices, it’s about consuming and publishing information with the best usability, building a responsive design that works across devices. If you haven’t built a responsive site or application, you’re already losing a quarter of your users and consequently reputation. These changes will impact everything we do every day, and most of all will impact society by radically changing the way we work and the way markets and economies measure their effectiveness.
Towards Cloud Computing
Many companies have already shifted to the Cloud. Cloud providers are also constantly trying to come up with the best offerings. They are focusing on long-term customer’s success, promoting collaboration features that will improve the workflows, maximizing productivity. Security measures also make “Server-less Computing” transparent and reliable, saving operational and infrastructural costs as well.
A daily life “augmented” by Data
We manage and augment our own lives digitally. Our physical presence has already become inseparable from its digital counterpart. We will eliminate screens in front of us to interact with holograms. We will choose our dresses in a store without trying them in the common changing rooms. The “Augmented Age” will bring a massive rethink of processes.
The most advanced technologies will become less visible and less intrusive, smarter and predictive by default. Amazon is exploring new opportunities for future shopping experiences, using AR. In the next future, people will be able to see how couches, stoves and chairs will look in their homes. All furnishings possibilities at hand and even shown under our nose!
What BaxEnergy is doing in terms of digitalization?
The global Tech-Evolution is also strongly impacting the renewables’ industry from the hardware to the software, from the construction to the assets’ monitoring systems, from the user experience to the O&M activities, changing procedures, workflows and lives of resources employed and power plants owners.
Furthermore, market players are rushing for complete digitization of their assets. With over 2.5 billion of mobile devices and smart phones in the World, we recognize the importance of providing the workforce with real time access, allowing users to interact with data anytime anywhere for a great experience in their office as well as on the road.
In a World increasingly digital and mobile, one of our next-gen platforms, Energy Studio Pro®, provides a tailor-made “Digital Strategy”, getting our customers and partners ready for an automated future. Need and demand of a turn-key system able to fit any power plant architecture is growing more and more. That is the reason why ESP is designed to be autonomously customizable through specific tools and it is built on an open and flexible architecture to easily exchanging data from and to third party systems (the Report Builder, the Workflow Editor and even the SCADA screens can be adapted to fit specific needs).
The ability to access large volumes of data with agility and ready access is leading to a rapid evolution in the application of AI and ML applications, which require an inescapable synergy with Big Data. And ESP is a scalable solution that allows to manage thousands and thousands of data with more than 80 Gigawatts reached of monitored power plants all over the World. Also, a wide range of IoT devices have been directly installed into power plants already monitored and can be remotely configured to read, acquire and import data directly to the ESP storage system.
In order to complete the functionalities of ESP and the 360°digitalization of the UX, we have designed the innovative Asset Management Solution AssetStack®, merging and building all the intelligence needed.
Contrary to many other systems, AssetStack® lets you keep the entire master data of all your assets in one place, becoming a true “company memory” of everything has occurred in your power plant: from construction schemas to commissioning data, from maintenance operations to visual inspections and calibrations records. AssetStack® and ESP are “Mobile-first” Solutions: the first one is fully available by mobile, the second one allows mobile real time monitoring.
Innovation is a key part of our mission and our R&D department is constantly researching new technologies and improving our solutions’ quality by specific procedures employed throughout the entire product development lifecycle. Challenging ideas and projects for industrial automation and smart building are still in progress and BaxEnergy is striving for continuous Evolution. New features are constantly made available to customers on a periodic basis and the functionalities of the systems are constantly revised and expanded to address and satisfy new needs. Discover more on www.baxenergy.com
