Cefla Partners With MIPU For Cutting-Edge Predictive Factory
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the areas in which we operate and the processes in which we are involved. The strength of the partnership between Cefla and MIPU lies precisely in a common background of shared intents, experiences, and skills.
Management in all its forms – of production, industrial, or energy management plants – has always aimed to promote efficiency, starting from enhancing the existing assets and, ideally, in a sustainable perspective based on interconnection. Viewing work as a sequence of interconnected steps, similar to links in a chain, implies that improving any one of these links will positively impact and optimise every other link in that chain. There are three concepts underlying the “predictive factory”: efficiency, sustainability, and inclusiveness, and being open to receiving new inputs can magnify the value of an existing process.
Cefla, with MIPU, has recently developed two new predictive maintenance platforms, C-cogenS and C- Platform, specially designed for energy production plants and technological systems in industrial plants – respectively.
Through the IoT (Internet of Things) and the internet (as opposed to the customer’s LAN), every object in an industrial plant can potentially have its own identity in the digital world and provide operational information to the maintenance service. The whole design and engineering process then happens through digital sensors, intelligent and interconnected, which using free Lan protocols, transmit data to a cloud platform that interacts with Cefla’s and the customer’s systems (if an interface is required).
“C-cogenS, developed on MIPU software, is a detailed real-time monitoring system that Cefla can make available to its customers to monitor the global efficiency and every single component,” said Laura Cenni, Cefla Engineering’s Business Process Manager. “Through this platform, it is possible to perform predictive maintenance on plants, as already happens in Rome’s Tor di Valle district heating plant for the multi-utility company Acea.”
Using a data source updated in real-time, through IoT technologies and searchable dashboards, it is possible to keep assets monitored, ensuring energy efficiency and lower service costs. The system is also customer-oriented and fully modular to adapt to customer needs. Based on the acquired expertise, Cefla and MIPU have then developed a C-Platform for all-round management of the industrial building: it collects data in the field, integrates with existing BMS systems, and can store the data from all the systems to a single cloud, displaying them on advanced dashboards and communicating with its own or the customer’s CMMS for the integration of scheduled maintenance plans.
“The partnership with MIPU is a major step for us and fits perfectly into a process that we started several years ago, which involves the development of increasingly integrated and digitised proposals, to obtain valuable solutions for our customers and our partners,” explained Massimo Milani, Managing Director of Cefla’s Engineering Business Unit. “The project we have in mind requires four-handed engagement, which will allow us to fine-tune our skills and identify the actual needs of our customers in all the areas in which we operate.”
In recent years, energy management is a sector in which Cefla has strengthened its highly sector-specific skills – with increasingly specialised solutions for the design and construction of cogeneration power plants, biomass plants, and plant engineering services.
“The path undertaken with Cefla is another, critically important step reminding us of how much MIPU has grown over the past ten years,” commented Giulia Baccarin, CEO and Co-founder of MIPU. “And at the same time, of how much more there is for us to do. We strongly believe that we will significantly impact the sustainability and competitiveness of Italian industry and municipalities, an impact already measurable in the 160 customer companies that have chosen us and are growing with us every day.”
Cefla consists of four business units. Each has a history of success, products, and innovations. Yet they are all part of a shared quest for improvement in which partnerships and skills interact to generate excellence and ensure satisfaction for all its customers and stakeholders.