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INDUSTRY FOCUS


RAIL


Meeting rail industry challenges


The rail industry faces many of the same challenges as other industrial sectors in the era of Digital Transformation (DX). As a result, new


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technologies must be put in place to take advantage of huge efficiency benefits and remain competitive. SolutionsPT explains the probleM


s one of the UK’s largest systems integrators, Actemium Automation (formerly known as Cougar Automation)


provides turnkey solutions for all types of industrial processes. In order to deliver a competitive advantage to its customer, the company deploys world-class industrial software including software from the AVEVA portfolio obtained via a long-standing relationship with SolutionsPT, the AVEVA Select partner in the UK and Ireland. Rich Hallett, regional leader, Actemium


Automation, explained: “Maintaining our Premier Partnership status with AVEVA and SolutionsPT has been a long-standing priority for Actemium Automation. We’ve worked together for many years, spanning multiple projects in a wide spectrum of sectors, and the support SolutionsPT provides helps us to develop new opportunities to work with the company at a strategic level and continue to improve our offering within a network of partner companies. Most recently, we created a bespoke solution for a global rail company that needed to streamline compliance reporting across multiple sites, and it offers a great case study of the benefits of working closely with SolutionsPT as a Premier Partner.”


up to the challenge


The customer, a global rail solutions provider, needed a digital solution to an inefficient and labour-intensive reporting issue that was


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reducing the amount of time key service personnel could spend maintaining the wider system. Live process and fuel consumption data were being manually retrieved daily from three geographically separated sites to meet compliance requirements and avoid potential fines from the network operator. To collect this data, the company was sending experienced maintenance staff to each site to take readings – a task that took a lot of time and prevented them focusing on other more proactive improvement and maintenance tasks. Each location had varying legacy


architectures that were collating the relevant data, but each was effectively siloed and unable to communicate with a central system. Hallett said: “The solution required wasn’t


about eliminating the requirement to report, it was about completing the task remotely and creating a single version of the truth for the customer that could be accessed at any time, from anywhere.” The right solution needed to bring together


remotely recorded data from multiple providers into a single software platform that offered the functionality and secure connectivity required to operate as one from a single, central, cloud- based interface. It needed to give the end user the insight they needed to make more-informed decisions quickly, improve asset reliability, reduce the time spend travelling, and seamlessly integrate with all existing systems.


To overcome these issues, Actemium Automation immediately brought in SolutionsPT. Tim Harrison, customer success manager, SolutionsPT, said: “Working with Actemium Automation is always a pleasure as they have a similar ethos to our own: to help drive continuous improvement and success for our customers and partners through the identification and deployment of world-class digital solutions. Everything we do is to provide the best result for our customers, and central to this is empowering the human workforce by removing time consuming, repetitive, tasks that reduce their capacity to add value in their principle roles. “When all is said and done, digital


transformation is only made possible by empowering people with the tools and insights to make better decisions. As Actemium Automation took us through the challenges of their customer, it quickly became clear that there was one product in our portfolio that delivered actionable insights from anywhere, at any time and on any device, and that was AVEVA Insight.” Created to be the quickest and simplest way


to increase operational agility, resilience and sustainability, AVEVA Insight assists remote working and gives operators fast access to actionable information. The cloud-based software platform helps contexualise data from multiple sources and present it to users on simple-to-use web-based dashboards. Importantly, AVEVA


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