Schneider Electric intros performance analytics, updates building operations app for StruxureWare software

by Brianna Crandall — April 10, 2015—Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, recently announced the launch of Performance Analytics, a new suite of functionality within its award-winning StruxureWare Resource Advisor software platform, and updates to its StruxureWare Building Operation software application, both for the company’s SmartStruxure suite.

Performance Analytics now enables consumption interval data collection and analysis, providing a clear view of operations at the enterprise level down to the site and even submeter level.
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Performance Analytics

The new Performance Analytics suite builds on Resource Advisor’s already powerful set of capabilities, which includes the ability to monitor energy and carbon markets, manage key sustainability metrics, and report results to stakeholders on more than 400 types of resource streams, including utility and facility data, weather data, and water and energy usage. The energy and sustainability platform reportedly helps more than 4,500 clients with over 20,000 users across 130 countries manage their energy spend.

To become more sustainable and efficient, companies must understand how their facilities consume resources on a site-by-site basis in enough detail to find inefficiencies and fix them, notes Schneider Electric. But they also need a simple way to look across the enterprise, in order to prioritize efforts, measure results, report to their stakeholders, and compare themselves to their peers. Performance Analytics now allows Resource Advisor users to collect, visualize, and analyze near-real-time interval data from a variety of sources, in context of this enterprise-wide view of their data.

Building Operation provides integrated monitoring, control, and management of energy, lighting, fire safety, and HVAC.

Performance Analytics allows for data collection and integration from multiple sources, significantly simplifying visualization and analysis of interval data, while reducing the cost of data acquisition. Leveraging Schneider Electric’s founding membership with the Green Button Association, Schneider Electric can collect data straight from the utility, bypassing the need for on-site meters and software. Schneider Electric can also tap into existing utility relationships to obtain interval data, or data can be obtained from a variety of meter, submeter or BMS data, which may exist on-site or can be installed. This flexibility enables customers to choose the most cost-effective way to develop a complete picture of their consumption, whether at the site-level or across their enterprise.

Building Operation

The StruxureWare Building Operation software application provides integrated monitoring, control and management of energy, lighting, fire safety and heating/ventilation/air-conditioning (HVAC) to ensure facilities are energy efficient and effectively managed. The new software includes a variety of features that are designed to increase scalability, protect against cyber threats, enhance usability and system access, and ultimately save time and reduce energy costs.

New features and enhancements available in StruxureWare Building Operation include:

  • Increased scalability offers greater flexibility for larger and distributed site architectures with varying applications and allows for easier expansion.
  • Cybersecurity enhancements via password policy improvements, information technology (IT) whitelisting to restrict access to a pre-defined list of hosts or devices, encryption, and automatic redirects to secure https sites and alarm enhancements all help protect facilities and their data against vulnerabilities.
  • Enhanced user experience and system access includes personalized Web layouts, HTML5 support for access across tablets and other devices, built-in search functionality for faster trouble-shooting and support for Microsoft products.
  • Engineering efficiencies occur by engineering servers offline and later deploying when live onsite. Additionally, the new software implements consistent design, ensuring repeatability and time efficiency, and minimizes site downtime for upgrades with runtime compatibility between versions.

Schneider Electric offers videos explaining the SmartStruxure solution on its Web site.