OSIsoft Selected as the 2011 Microsoft Sustainability Partner of the Year  

Managing for Sustainability Starts with the PI System  

A variety of global forces are fundamentally reshaping the economic horizon. Many industry leaders are concerned with the uncertainty of dependable long term supplies of natural resources, affordable clean energy and fresh water. The risks from these trends have many organizations rethinking established operating paradigms and managing their enterprises to lessen their impact on the environment. 

Across the globe, businesses are increasingly embracing sustainability as a core management strategy to address these challenges. Many businesses discover that viewing their operations through a sustainability lens reliably creates value from finding new, more efficient and cleaner processes and can also lead to innovative breakthroughs. This improves long term profitability while enhancing the organization’s reputation with shareholders, customers, suppliers, governments and the public.    

The OSIsoft PI System provides access to all manufacturing data in real-time. The value of this real-time capability is only now being recognized by the Sustainability community and thought leaders. The fact is OSIsoft customers have been using the PI System to manage for Sustainability long before the term ‘Sustainability’ became mainstream. The leading real-time data collection and management infrastructure, to create an engine for continuous business improvement. A corporate sustainability strategy incorporating an agile enterprise-wide foundation of the PI System can deliver multiple streams of value: 

Manufacturing companies originally installed the PI System for solutions such as Process Optimization and Troubleshooting, Condition Based Maintenance, Emissions Monitoring, and Production Cost Analysis. Many then expanded into energy and water monitoring, resource efficiency, etc. To them, it was just good business. When OSIsoft starting talking about Sustainability many of our customers said, "We’re already doing that."

“Our agreement with OSIsoft has saved us over $1 million in energy costs alone.” - Bob Anderson, RockTenn. 

Measure Everything  

The principle "You can't improve what you can 't measure" is the bedrock for an effective Sustainability strategy. The PI System realizes this by collecting and storing real-time data from virtually any source. Customers measure anything and everything across the business value chain. No one else can match the performance and reliability of the PI System as a foundation on which to build a lasting and effective Sustainability strategy.

Utilities are also using the PI System to help deliver on the promise of the Smart Grid for Sustainability. The PI System is an important component of Microsoft’s Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA) because it is capable of storing and managing measurements from the the millions of data points from generation to transmission to the smart meters.

Trend Everything  

You cannot benchmark improvements if you do not have operational visibility. The PI System enables enterprise wide visibility, allowing customers to compare and prioritize their Sustainability investments using facts rather than estimates and assumptions. OSIsoft customers such as Kodak, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Alcoa are just a few examples where the PI System is used to socialize data to knowledge workers across business silos, enabling collaboration to drive the biggest improvements.

"The key to conservation success is visibility into cost and performance data that spans the entire chain of energy production and use." – Chilkoot Ward, Director of Utilities, University of Alaska, Fairbanks 

Sustainability  

There are many current definitions for the term Sustainability that encompass environmental stewardship, social responsibility and/or generally relate to the intelligent consumption of resources. Eventually though, Sustainability has to be viewed in a business context and should be synonymous with long term survivability.

Sustainability in its simplest terms is about an enterprise’s long term survivability. It's about conducting business in a way that protects economic and environmental resources as well as upholding social responsibilities. Organizations need to tackle sustainability with a comprehensive, enterprise-wide approach and implement a culture of continuous improvement. Sustainability needs to address pre-compliance, public mandate, and profitability simultaneously.

The PI System for Sustainability  

OSIsoft’s PI System has been at the core of managing resources and empowering data-driven decisions for 30 years. The PI System supports Sustainability efforts of diverse companies by providing an infrastructure for continuous improvement that has proven positive business impact and payback. The PI System provides answers to today’s business problems and an infrastructure to build towards tomorrow’s opportunities.

The PI System provides features and performance characteristics that can make any Sustainability initiative more dynamic and effective. For example, the PI System is capable of capturing real-time data at sub-second intervals and storing it in its original fidelity. Capturing highly granular data reduces the possible oversight of key trends and anomalies

Second, the PI System has the ability to scale, capturing data from very large numbers of measurement points in complex business environments and geographically dispersed locations. Customers can bring together silo’d data from numerous sources across a plant and across multiple plants.

These capabilities found in the PI System impact all the major spheres of Sustainability: people, planet and profit. Investments in a Sustainability solution based on the PI System can deliver multiple streams of value including:

• Provide relevant KPIs’ to measure progress toward Sustainability objectives, 
• Define accurate baselines for setting employee incentive-based systems to drive organizational change, 
• Confidently support management transparency goals and compliance reporting mandates with accurate data, information and knowledge, 
• Drive innovation through enhanced collaboration by getting information into the hands of key staff across operational silos,
• Enhance business intelligence and business analytics capabilities by gaining access to trusted real-time data either in its original fidelity or aggregated, 
• Better utilize scarce capital by targeting the most cost effective sustainability solutions for investments, raw materials, energy, emissions, and water management  
• Facilitate energy accounting with accurate cost allocation for equipment, processes, and production   
• Reduce the waste of raw materials, enhance productivity and profitability with optimized asset management,  
• Extract value from  the supply chain by improving life-cycle assessment and logistics capabilities,

The PI System provides our customers with the ability to gain true real-time operational insight into their businesses through the use of an information infrastructure that can span global operations. With a solid infrastructure in place, OSIsoft customers are much better positioned to build their Sustainability strategies successfully. 

To learn more on how OSIsoft is creating an infrastructure for sustainability, take a look at the following collection of presentations and contact Andrew Fanara, OSIsoft's Sustainability Strategist.