Cefla and MIPU recently signed an agreement to offer its customers solutions that are at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence, energy management and predictive maintenance.
This agreement is fully in line with Cefla's vision as a partner of choice for an integrated proposal for the design, implementation and maintenance of technologically advanced systems.
Henry Ford II, grandson of the more famous Henry Ford I, founder of the famous automaker and inventor of Fordism, strolled through his company with Walter Reuther, head of the powerful workers' union in the auto industry.
At one point Ford jokingly turns to Reuther and says , "Hey, Walter, how are you going to get these robots to join the union?" And Reuther, "Hey, Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?"
In 1950 we were still not talking about the predictive factory, which isa factory where people, machines and processes are networked and where the data thus collected are systematically used to predict The phenomena of the near future in order to gain a competitive advantage.
Today the predictive factory is not only possible, it is also the only viable way forward for efficient, sustainable and inclusive manufacturing.
Whether in manufacturing, industrial or energy management facilities, the common goal of those in charge is always to try to make efficiency, starting with the enhancement of the existing and possibly in a sustainable interconnectedness perspective: conceiving work as a series of interconnected steps, as if they were links in a chain, presupposes that the improvement of any one link enhances the optimization of each of the others.
Thus there are three concepts underlying the so-called "predictive factory": efficiency, because it is possible to optimize the management of people, materials and financial resources; sustainability, because existing data are leveraged to design new ways of working (artificial intelligence is self-improving); and inclusiveness, because diversity (age, gender vision, ethnicity) and the welcoming of new contributions actually increase the value of an existing process.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the contexts in which we work as well as the processes in which we are involved.
The strength of the meeting between Cefla and MIPU lies precisely in the commonality of purpose, experience and expertise of a major industrialist like ours-which, with more than 90 years of history behind it, continues to develop solutions to improve the well-being of the places where people live and work-and a dynamic company like MIPU that is leading the way on the digital front and, leveraging a modular and easily integrated proprietary software platform brings prediction to factories and cities to reduce waste, costs and difficulties, enhancing the value of the existing.
The predictive maintenance platforms, C-cogens and C-platform.
There has been much talk in recent years about predictive maintenance data-driven approaches: applications of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have been presented as the solution to all problems.
However, there is no one maintenance policy that is better than the others: each company must carefully choose the right mix in order to define its strategy.
Cefla, with MIPU, has recently developed two new predictive maintenance platforms, C- cogenS and C-Platform, dedicated to power generation plants and technology plants in industrial plants, respectively.
C-cogenS, is adetailed real-time monitoring system that Cefla offers to its customers to keep the overall efficiency of power generation plant under control. As already happens in the case of the district heating plant in Tor di Valle, Rome, for the multitutility Acea, through a source of data updated in real time, through IoT technologies and searchable dashboards, it is possible to keep the assets monitored, thus ensuring energy efficiency and reduction of intervention costs. In addition, the system is "Custumer Oriented," fully scalable according to customer needs.
Based on this experience, C-Platform was also born, to manage the industrial building in the round: as c-CogenS collects data in the field, integrates with existing BMS systems, is able to historicize data from all plants in a single cloud, displaying them on advanced dashboards, and communicates with the customer's own or customer's CMMS for integration of scheduled maintenance plans.
"The partnership with MIPU is an important step for us, and it fits perfectly into a path we started several years ago, which involves the development of an increasingly integrated and digitized proposition in order to achieve valuable solutions for our customers and partners. The project that we have in mind certainly involves four-handed work, which will allow us to consolidate our skills and thus identify the real needs of our customers, in all the areas in which we operate, whether it is therefore production facilities with our Cefla Tech, an area in which we are investing a great deal, or technological facilities or even energy management facilities. A sector, that of energy, in which our experience has been deeply consolidated in recent years - with increasingly specialized proposals in the design and construction of cogeneration power plants, biomass power plants and plant engineering services."
Massimo Milani, Managing Director of Cefla's Engineering Business Unit
"The path we have taken together with Cefla is a further and fundamental step that reminds us how much MIPU has grown in these 10 years," "and how much more we still have to do. We are firmly rooted in the conviction that we will be able to bring a significant impact on sustainability and competitiveness of Italian industry and cities, an impact that we already measure on the 160 clients who have chosen us and with whom we grow every day."
Giulia Baccarin, CEO and Co-founder of MIPU