"The drive to bring down energy consumption – and its cost – has spread to higher education. The University of Florida, for instance, is investing almost $30 million to save roughly $5 million over the next two decades. Overall, investing large sums upfront to save money on energy costs can have many motivations. Many colleges and universities face financial pressures, so bringing down the trajectory of energy costs is sensible." To access the full article on #KnowledgeReview, please click the link below:

‘Poor management of energy consumption and wastage of energy are some of the reasons for the runaway situation around carbon emissions from facilities and integrating data through smart technologies implemented onsite are steps in the right directions says Marcela Ximenes, Head of Education Technologies at Radix.’ The world is facing on urgent crises of limiting the runaway global warming and must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. But what is less realized, and similar to most fluid consumption models, of the energy consumed by facilities in the US, 68% of the energy is actually wasted while buildings across the facilities are responsible for 80% of the energy consumption. Research buildings or competency centers, usually present inside sprawling facilities, and legacy engineering practices for ventilation, heating and cooling, are also responsible for these runaway emission trends.

HOUSTON, Oct. 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pro- Frotas , a 100% digital fuel supply management start-up created in partnership with Ipiranga, is growing its operations with technology developed by Radix Engineering and Software . Ipiranga, a subsidiary of U l t r a , is the largest private player in the Brazilian fuel distribution market, with nationwide coverage and a network of approximately 7,200 service stations. Pro-Frotas was conceived with the purpose of reinventing the fleet refueling business, with technology that would supply 100% digital, free supply management and payment. Pro-Frotas contracted Radix, IIOT digital transformation experts, to create an application and web portal for management and control of fueling.

-by Geraldo Luiz Rochocz  THE AI BOOM  Take a simple test: type "Artificial Intelligence" into any internet search engine. At the time of writing, the term already amassed hundreds of millions of results, an impressive number for a technology that only recently reached the mainstream. Despite the recent boom, driven by tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard (Gemini), AI's history dates back years. Its roots lie in advances in deep learning, a field familiar to scientists and researchers for quite some time. Few may recall, but as early as the early 2000s, the topic was already being discussed, including the release of the movie A.I. - Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Spielberg in 2001. But even that does not express the true age of this technology: The concept of Neural Networks appeared in 1943! Though the boundaries of this technology and its potential remain uncertain, unlike other recent innovations such as the metaverse, AI has quickly gained popularity in its use and concepts- and the numbers don’t lie. WHAT IS THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF AI?  Gartner predicts AI Software will grow to $297 Billion By 2027. And this is only the beginning. Gartner forecasts the market will grow at a 19.1% compound annual growth rate in the next six years. Generative AI specifically (GenAI software spending) is expected to boom from 8% in 2023 to 35% by 2027.  The industry´s digital transformation is expected to continue at an accelerated pace. But, if the plans for the future of this technology appear grand, the challenges are no smaller: AI adoption is not simple or out of the box - companies need clear access to clean data to create effective AI solutions, and IT needs to bridge the gap between technology and business to ensure that data and AI lead to operational improvements.  It is essential that industry players carefully analyze how AI fits into their current digital strategies and prepare for the pitfalls that exist when attempting to fully leverage its potential.  THE ROLE OF DATA IN AI  The potential of AI to drive growth and reduce costs cannot be overestimated, especially in energy and manufacturing, where data dependence and analysis are crucial for innovation. These sectors are built on increasingly complex and subtle processes and AI, specifically GenAI, provides a potential for a much-needed reduction in complexity.   It’s one of the many reasons firms like GlobalData are predicting that, "AI can generate $2.4 trillion in value for the energy sector by 2035, representing an 11% increase in sector revenue."    Achieving the benefits of AI requires that companies define AI, recognize the challenges in effectively implementing these solutions, and develop the roadmap and strategies needed to overcome these challenges.   Defining AI  According to Gartner, AI is the process of applying advanced analysis and logic-based techniques, including machine learning (ML), to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions.   The key to this definition is the view that AI adds actionable intelligence to good data, empowering decision-making, and operational performance.   At Radix, we leverage this approach to AI to help our clients and customers, specifically in sectors that generate an enormous amount of data, achieve Asset Performance Management (APM) insights that:    Drive production and productivity.   Boost operational efficiency, sustainability, and safety.   Scale better to meet demand, uncover, and remove bottlenecks.  From sensor logs and engineering reports, to work orders and maintenance records, we help our customers implement AI solutions and programs such as generative AI to better understand and leverage their rich data sources to optimize operations and make better decisions.  The Challenges to Effective AI   Some of the main pitfalls when implementing AI include:  Definition of terms and explainability around what AI systems are, how they function, and the expected outcomes and potential challenges.   Select the proper AI techniques (there are dozens of them) for each use case, avoiding current fads.   Efficient access to the right data in real-time.   An approach to building a multi-agent intelligent-based platform that   allows the integration of AI models and tools from third-party providers.   Improving the ability to monitor controls continuously, throughout model and application development, testing and deployment, and ongoing operations.   A need for new methods to test, validate, and improve AI-powered workflows.  Addressing the changing regulatory landscape, from the EU AI Act to regulatory frameworks in North America.  What can A.I. with Radix Do for Me?    The short answer is converting your asset performance to asset excellence across your entire enterprise and at every stage of your operational lifecycle.     Recently, Radix leveraged Generative AI, along with other solutions, to optimize operations in a large industrial client looking to transition from manual tools and spreadsheets to a digital platform – on a global scale. With help from Radix, they leveraged A.I. to boost asset performance management in over 100 plants globally.     The results of partnering with Radix for A.I. integration led to:  Streamlined and more accurate financials that netted millions in annual savings.   Decreased electricity and utilities costs obtained from energy optimization in plant equipment and better decisions based on operational insights from real-time forecasting of electricity usage for real-time price monitoring during price hikes to prevent overspending.  Savings of over $5 MM yearly with maintenance by mitigating unexpected downtime and optimizing planned downtime (revenue increase not accounted).  Accurate real-time materials balancing model for real-time tracking of production, inventory, raw materials, production, waste, and unaccounted losses. The model runs with less 0.5% deviation and allows real-time forecasts of monthly production.  Reduction of $ 2 MM per year in production losses with real-time prediction of physical properties of polymers and enhanced control strategies.  How to Start?  Companies need to partner with firms to help them through the journey of successful AI integration. At Radix we not only solve the challenges above, but we also design and validate the target architecture and include the program and project rigor that provides communication and governance planning.   AI Implementation should be driven by business needs. The same thinking applies to governance. Value streams prioritize specific tasks and details after establishing the first set of guidelines and security boundaries.  Radix already offers advanced AI solutions for companies worldwide by making intelligent and strategic use of this technology. We help navigate all these challenges to optimize asset integrity, improve maintenance efficiency, accelerate new product discovery, create virtual consultants, and assist and optimize production.  We have a record of accomplishment of helping our customers successfully implement AI so that they can realize the following Gartner benefits:   By 2026, organizations that operationalize AI transparency, trust and security will see their AI models achieve a 50% improvement in terms of adoption, business goals and user acceptance.  By 2026, enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the number and time it takes to operationalize AI models by at least 25%.  If you want to learn more about AI and how we can help you leverage this solution for your business results, follow the lead of some of the world's largest companies and contact Radix today at www.radixeng.com .

Natalia Klafke with Radix and Michael Hotaling with ExxonMobil deliver insights on leveraging open-source tools and digital twins to maximize value in Energy, industry, and beyond.

Radix Engineering participated at TAPPICon 2023 as a Ruby sponsor. Radix addressed aspects of the Digitally-Integrated Asset Data Lifecycle that aligned with this year’s conference theme, " Three Rings of Success: Vision, Technology, Action .” Radix also sponsored the Women’s Summit Reception on Saturday, April 22. Maximizing Value with Live Digital Twins Demo Radix is unlocking data to maximize value creation by providing pulp & paper manufacturers solutions and tools that improve a mill's consistency, process stability, and regulatory control. Through a live Digital Twin Demo, in which we use AWS TwinMaker, we will emphasize the importance of data to reduce cost, variability, and improve production quality. “The ability to capture the data and make it available for use by anyone able to create value drives the primary strategy of creating a data driven environment. By eliminating data silos (i.e., unlocking data) it is possible to increase the number of employees and SME’s that can take part in diagnosing issues. The fundamental difference between trying to be digital and being data driven is the desire to automate versus the desire to leverage every source of data to drive value creation by de-risking future decisions.” For more information on Radix’ solutions for the Pulp and Paper Industry: https://content.radixeng.com/radix-tappicon Presenter Bios Stephen Janes is a Professional Mechanical Engineer and Project Management Professional with more than 10 years of engineering experience. For the past 5 years, Stephen has led and managed PIMS deployments and system integrations for the Pulp and Paper industry and others at Radix. He has had the privilege of working with industry leaders such as Georgia-Pacific, Kimberly Clark, WestRock, and Cascades. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University. Stephen is passionate about leveraging technology to enhance manufacturing operations and is known for creating innovative solutions. At TAPPICon he has been invited to be member of the YP (Young Professionals) panel discussion centered around the impact technology can have to not only to improve mill performance, but also pose an opportunity to create a better, more predictable work life for future mill engineers with a specific focus on employee retention. To learn more, reach out to our experts: contact@radixeng.com.

Pulp and Paper mills across the globe are facing the challenge of being more productive and delivering more quality, while minimizing and optimizing costs. In a scenario where companies seek to provide solutions without large investments, using existing facilities most efficiently becomes not only desirable, but necessary. The Pulp and Paper industry faces the challenge of making decisions dynamically and quickly, while production areas are coordinated individually and not as integrated as they should be. Mill-wide Optimization tools could be the next step toward more efficient operations. Specifically, since solutions for coordinating process areas are uncommon and opportunities often exist between process areas for optimizing operations with new capabilities, like Digital Twins.... Interested in reading more? Click below to download and discover:

The Pulp and paper industry is historically an industry that boosts production by increasing operational utilization rates. Need more output? Buy more wood, put in more machines and vats and presses, add another work shift – and repeat as needed. The challenge with this approach is that the processes being used have a lot of variability, and machines degrade and wear out quickly. While digital technology, automation, and analytics can move P&P away from this “brute-force” roots, like many manufacturing fields, P&P faces new and additional challenges when incorporating IT into its operational technology (OT). To read the full article please click the link below:

Radix Engineering and Software is now offering support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts to help customers who need a hybrid architecture and on-premises environment to manage plant floor applications. Radix is working with AWS to define the reference architecture for running AVEVA PI System from OSIsoft, now part of AVEVA, on AWS Outposts. AVEVA PI System (formerly PI Core) is a portfolio of industrial data management products that connects process and sensor data to operators and decision makers throughout an organization. AWS Outposts, a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience, brings fully managed AWS infrastructure and services to nearly any on-premises or edge location to support modernization of manufacturing workloads and business-critical plant floor applications. With common infrastructure, services, application programming interfaces (APIs), and tools in the cloud and on-premises environments, manufacturers can become more agile, resilient, efficient, and competitive. By supporting AWS Outposts with AVEVA PI System, manufacturers benefit from real-time data infrastructure that collects sensor-based data from many different sources with a consistent experience, as well as streamlined regulatory compliance. A wide spectrum of manufacturers can benefit from the low-latency processing, reduced management burden, and modern security delivered by AWS Outposts. AWS Outposts allow customers to modernize applications and process data that needs to stay close to plant floor control systems including manufacturing execution systems (MES), high-frequency trading, or medical diagnostics. AWS Outposts also helps to centralize control of operations with a consistent hybrid architecture solution. Manufacturers can gain a competitive edge by increasing productivity, innovating faster, and making both IT and production lines more efficient. “Manufacturers that want to use the cloud to modernize plant floor applications face a range of challenges, which cannot be easily overcome by typical hybrid architecture solutions. As a technology solution provider with a proven track record serving the needs of industrial and non-industrial customers – across oil and gas, plant and utilities, chemicals, pulp and paper, food and beverage, universities, hospitals, and more – we are excited to work with AWS to address the challenges of customers with stringent low-latency data requirements and data residency needs,” commented Flávio Niemeyer Guimarães, Radix’ Global Leader of Alliances and Strategic Practices. “Thousands of customers rely on AVEVA PI System daily to run their critical operations. AWS Outposts allow customers to run and manage their AWS workloads and keep their critical systems and data on premises. Radix has tested the operation of AVEVA PI System on AWS Outposts and can support our joint customers in their cloud journey and gain the benefits of running on AWS,” said Mike Graves, Director, Global System Integrators at AVEVA. Radix already has several customers running AVEVA PI System on AWS in the chemical, fertilizer, glass, and pulp and paper industries. Radix developed a process analytics platform using AWS together with AVEVA PI System for one of the largest pulp and paper producers in Brazil. Results included faster data analysis and improved operational efficiency, reduced response time, and centralized process knowledge that is easily accessible to all process engineers. Click here to learn more about our manufacturing solutions and innovations: https://content.radixeng.com/operational-excellence-manufacturing About Radix Engineering & Software Founded in 2010, Radix Engineering & Software (www.radixeng.com) is a privately-held, global engineering, software, and Industrial OT/ IT Consulting company. Radix provides technology-based solutions to industrial (oil and gas, chemicals, power, metals and mining, pulp and paper, and food and beverage) and non-industrial (transportation, education, health care, financial, and entertainment) customers. Radix’s North American headquarters is in Houston, TX. The global HQ is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with offices also in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. With a strong focus on results, people, and long-term relationships, Radix has developed projects in more than 25 countries worldwide. To learn more, reach out to our experts: contact@radixeng.com.

Applying the power of data to the pulp and paper (P&P) industry is a game-changing approach towards potentially driving profits and minimizing downtime. The Pulp and paper industry is historically an industry that boosts production by increasing operational utilization rates. Need more output? Buy more wood, put in more machines and vats and presses, add another work shift – and repeat as needed.  The challenge with this approach is that the processes  being used have a lot of variability, and machines degrade and wear out quickly. While digital technology, automation, and analytics can move P&P away from this “brute-force” roots, like many manufacturing fields, P&P faces new and additional challenges when incorporating IT into its operational technology (OT).  For example, one of the main challenges stemming from the addition of new technologies, like the Internet of Things (IoT), is the added data and complexity that ultimately slows production and often creates operational confusion.  The P&P process is multi-variant, that is, there are numerous steps to go from raw wood to finished product, and each step has its own process, with its own performance characteristics, tolerances, etc. Operators and engineers, though, often look at each step on its own. For instance, if I’m running a digester, it’s just from raw wood to pulp. Yet from an organizational perspective, the view leaders often need goes from raw wood to final sellable product. The result is a much larger, more complex process than users often see or plan for. Another challenge in this industry is the fact that many, long-established industrial companies, including pulp and paper, don’t necessarily have all the data they need to crunch through multi-variant analyses. This come from a history where plants were all standalone and not connected to any main system for a long time.  Step One: Open the Data Envelope Companies that lack the data they need to improve operations need to start by capturing the data for future analytics. Finding the disparate data sources and utilizing the proper data management is essential for any integration of technology, to bring innovation to a digital transformation effort. If you do have the data, you want to use multi-variant analytics to remove the impact of time from the process – remove time from troubleshooting, or remove time from dwell times, for instance. It may be in small segments, but anything that shortens the manufacturing process is a gain. Then the same kind of multi-variant analytics can be applied to each step of the end-to-end process, for instance during mechanical pulping and chemical pulping, to identify where small incremental improvements are possible. With this caveat: each time one small piece of the process is adjusted and improved, it is likely to create new bottlenecks, upstream and/or downstream. If the pulping process is streamlined, just a little bit, then more wood needs to be brought in (upstream) and/or more capacity is needed at the cleaning stage (downstream).  Partnering with an organization like Radix that shares a deep history in Pulp and Paper helps address these and other challenges. Radix provides data-driven guidance to execute these small adjustments, identify their ripple effects, and find the adjustments that are needed to smooth out those ripples. Radix can also help align all stakeholders - from senior leaders who need to be aware of the data insights and optimization results to better act on the information, to plant managers who need to make data-driven decisions and work with the operations team and the maintenance team to improve data-driven decisions.  You have to open up the data envelope, have it accessible to everyone with a role in the end-to-end process, not build it into a cloud where very few people have access to it. To learn more about how Radix is leveraging data to drive operational value for our customers visit www.radixeng.com .