Drives & Controls October 2022

n NEWS October 2022 www.drivesncontrols.com 8 THEUK INDUSTRIAL SOFTWARE developer Aveva is offering its products on a subscription model, allowing customers to buy“credits”which they can exchange for any items in Aveva’s portfolio. The subscriptions are available for periods of one to five years, and the credits are consumed on a monthly basis. Traditional sales yardsticks such as I/O and tag counts are no longer used. According to Steve Treanor, sales operations manager at Aveva distributor, SolutionsPT, buying software by subscription can cut upfront costs by 65% in the first year, compared to the traditional“perpetual licence”model. In some cases the payback can be as short as six months, he adds. Some – mainly cloud-based – products will only be available on the Flex subscription . Users can swap the products they use during their subscriptions and pick those that they need for particular projects. They can access a configurator that calculates how many credits they are likely to need for a project. If they don’t use all of their credits, they lose them. Aveva launched the subscription model in a low-key way about three years ago. According to Treanor, take-up has been tripling every year. But his colleague Andy Graham adds that “the perpetual model is not going away – it’s still a big part of the business and there will always be those who want a perpetual licence”He expects about 25% of customers to stick with the traditional model. • Schneider Electric, which bought 60% of Aveva for £3bn in 2017, is buying the remining 40% of the business in a deal worth £9.4bn. www.solutionspt.com Buying software by subscription ‘can cut upfront costs by 65%’ MARS, THE GLOBAL MANUFACTURER of confectionery, food, and pet care products, which employs more than 140,000 people in more than 80 countries, has announced plans for a new cloud-based platform for its manufacturing, data-handling and artificial intelligence (AI) activities that will lay the foundation for its vision of the “factory of the future”. It has reached an agreement with the services supplier Accenture under which they will work together to apply digital twin technologies and models to Mars’ manufacturing plants globally. This will give Mars’operators real-time insights into current and predicted performance of their production lines. Mars, whose annual sales are worth almost $45bn, plans to apply these technologies to“dozens”of sites over the coming three years. Over the next two years, Accenture and Mars plan to create a new cloud platform that will support next-generation robotics, AI and automation capabilities at the edge, making Mars’manufacturing operations much more efficient and addressing sustainability goals such as reducing waste and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. “Our collaboration with Accenture – combined with our partnership with Microsoft – enables us to scale digital twin technology to reach this goal, delivering not just significant cost savings and sustainability, but preparing our manufacturing operations for the future,” says MarsWrigley’s vice-president and global chief information officer, William Beery. Applying digital twins to its manufacturing plants will allow Mars to simulate and validate the results of product and factory adjustments before needing to allocate time and resources. “At Mars, we are constantly looking for innovative and sustainable ways to create value in our end-to-end supply chain, and digital manufacturing is a key priority,”explains Thiago Veiga, senior director of digital supply, R&D and procurement at the family-owned business, whose brands includeWrigley, Skittles, Snickers, M&M’s, Dolmio, Pedigree andWhiskas. Accenture will bring cloud, engineering, manufacturing and supply chain capabilities to the project. It will also work with Microsoft to apply its Azure cloud platform, along with its own edge accelerators. “The problems we’re solving aren’t new,”says Simon Osborne, a managing director at Accenture, who is leading its digital twin work with Mars.“What’s new is how we use advanced technologies to get real-time data into operators’hands and apply AI to help themmake decisions before problems occur. While many companies are beginning to experiment with digital twins, what sets this project apart is the speed and scaling of the technology across Mars’operations globally.” The agreement between Mars and Accenture builds on an earlier trial of digital twins at Mars manufacturing operations that started in late 2020. The companies tested using a digital twin to reduce over-filling of packages – a common problem in the food industry. This gave Mars a bird’s-eye view of production lines at a factory in Illinois. The twin fed sensor data frommanufacturing machinery into a predictive analytics model, allowing operators to monitor events in real- time and adjust filling processes accordingly. After the successful initial trial, Accenture and Mars have introduced similar technologies across the US and developed similar systems for Mars’pet care businesses in Europe and China. Mars makes plans for cloud-based digital ‘factories of the future’ Mars plans to transform and modernise its global manufacturing operations with AI, cloud, edge computing and digital twin technologies. Photo: BusinessWire