Operational Excellence software solutions

Digital solutions transforming the way to run operations in the age of Industry 4.0 - with more flexibility and agility

Operational Excellence with ABB:  Our offering  |  Expert insights |  Your journey  |  Analyst views  |  Testimonials  | Downloads  |   Cyber security  | Digital transformation

If you are looking to realize your business strategy more consistently and reliably:
  • meet ever changing customer expectations, price and regulatory constraints
  • lower operational risk, lower operating costs, increase revenues through execution excellence
  • develop an integrated, real-time operations management across plant and enterprise
  • foster continuous improvement and a long-term change in organizational culture
Digital Transformation

Inspire meaningful change
Let's talk

Our offering

Take smarter steps towards autonomous operations

by industry-specific solution
by category
Cement MES
Metals MES
Discrete MES
Mining MES
Energy industries
Pulp & paper MES
Food & beverage MES
Specialty chemicals MES
Manufacturing Execution Systems, MES
Overall Equipment Efficiency, OEE
Time-Series Data Historian
ERP & Shopfloor Integration

Expert Insights

Q&A with Jacob Abbott
Productizing interoperability in mining
Blog by Rajesh Nandakumar Nair
5 business drivers for adopting digital operations in mining
Blog by Eduardo Lima
10 Lessons from 10 Years of Remote Operations Centers
Article
3 reasons to upgrade your current cement MES
Article
Why MES is a critical stepping stone in your digital transformation journey
First published in Paper Industry Magazine
Data management best practices: 5 tips for success
By Eduardo Lima
Ending analysis paralysis for agile co-creation
ABB working with AWS to develop digitally integrated all-electric operations for net-zero emissions mining
Control room design

Critical for daily decision-making affecting corporate goals
By Tarun Mathur
Steel melt shop is getting smarter
Webinar on Demand + software demo
Practical tips for food & beverage digitalization
By Andrew Wilson
Why every digital enterprise needs superglue
Blog series
Big Data and decision-making in industrial plants
ABB Review
5G for digital industries
by Marc Leroux
OEE as a business and financial KPI

Your Operational Excellence journey

Whether a company’s overarching strategy is cost competitiveness, client intimacy, product performance, added value through services or combinations thereof, it experiences the pressure to be resource-efficient, sustainable, flexible and agile, and its assets must be safe, long-lived and reliable.

Reaching a few of those objectives is a challenge, but reaching all of them at the same time represents truly differentiating performance. Operational excellence is improved by focusing personnel on value-adding activities and optimizing production processes.

A first step towards improved operation and decision making is getting access to information based on accurate data, involving information sharing and application integration. In developing common information models companies also discover the impressive complexity and effort to do so. Interfacing existing applications with and developing new analytics applications on top of that common pool of contextualized information, is then the next, considerable task.

Working with a partner that has the competency and clear focus to bring free data flow across the entire value chain is the best approach to harness the power of digitalization and continuous improvement culture for industries.
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Analyst and ABB views

IoT Analytics
ARC Advisory Group
McKinsey

The convergence of software tools and increasing integration of AI

IoT Analytics
"Digitalization is bringing major technical change everywhere simultaneously. While IoT platforms were initially optimized for handling a wide range of IoT data generated by connected factories, MES have recently also developed new functionality to handle similar data streams.
As these software tools continue to overlap more, end-users now have multiple options for performing manufacturing software tasks."

Advanced analytics solutions can help achieve operational excellence

ARC Advisory Group
"An advanced analytics solution should cater and align all the different roles/levels starting from operators/supervisors, line and functional managers, functional analysts/strategists, and executives. Building such business analytics solutions can be implemented in a very short period of time based on management commitment."
The most important factor in an advanced analytics solution is the industry specific domain knowledge and in-depth understanding.

Transform the whole business, not just parts

McKinsey
"The cross-functional operational excellence simultaneously addresses processes, digital, analytics, management practices, mindsets, behaviors, and capabilities; applies proven approaches and tools for building capability and managing change and implementation; and aligns people, technology, and strategic planning to enable radical change."
Creating a clear vision for your people with ABB: cross-functional operational transformation approach for the whole scope of functions and interfaces.

Develop a vision for your operations

Improved
manufacturing efficiency

~2-5%


Lower
production input costs

~2%


Improved
customer satisfaction

~10-20%


Reduced
Inventory

~10%


Lower
total cost of ownership

~25%


Let's talk

Testimonials

20 PULP & PAPER SITES

"We have partnered with ABB because of their demonstrated commitment to the pulp and paper industry, their proven technical solutions and worldwide team, as well as their clear strategies for future investment and improvement in their MES solutions."

Jeff Wright, Project Director and North American CIO for Sappi

ABB awarded collaborative MES agreement, supporting Sappi’s digital transformation across its entire production fleet

ABB has been selected by Sappi Limited to support a major digital transformation project across its global manufacturing footprint in Europe, North America, and South Africa.

The rollout of ABB’s Ability™ Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for pulp and paper will be a key focus in the digital transformation across Sappi’s entire production fleet. The project has begun and will extend over several years.

GREEN HYDROGEN SUPPLIER

“Around the world, ABB's innovative solutions are improving industrial efficiency, productivity and quality, while minimizing environmental impact. In addition, ABB is already very active in the world of hydrogen and renewable activities. Their experience and broad portfolio will hopefully mean we are in a position to partner on future projects.”


Matthieu Guesné, founder of Lhyfe

Lhyfe’s first green hydrogen clean energy production project

ABB supports a wide range of industries in their digital transformation and will supply the first Lhyfe production site with its Freelance distributed control system and ABB Ability™ Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) digital platform. These solutions will control all the elements involved in the hydrogen production process at the Bouin site in the Vendée region, France and ABB’s automation technology is being installed to deliver improved efficiency, safety and productivity across the operation.



A STEEL PLANT

“We relied on the metallurgical expertise of ABB’s Metals team as they proved to us that this digital solution could be integrated into our complex plant with its diversified operational procedures. The figures and the results from testing stacked up and we could see the capacity to enhance productivity, improve energy efficiency and generate a relativity quick return on investment too.”

Gajraj Singh Rathore, President, JSW Steel Ltd

ABB completes melt shop digitalization project with India’s leading steel company, boosting productivity and profitability
ABB Ability™ Smart Melt Shop solution is expected to increase the company’s EBITDA profit by around USD two million per annum through four percent higher casting speeds, time savings of one working day per month and additional output equating to 24,000 tonnes a year.

MINING SITES

 "The performance requirements of a software package that exchanges and processes granular events with rich information in real-time, when compared to a software package designed for periodical manual entry, are like comparing chalk and cheese and that’s where ABB plays a big role. ABB’s investment, both in financial terms as well as time, together with their expertise, is critical for this project.” Listed among the AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies in 2021.

ETP Managing Director, John Kirkman

ABB links with University of Western Australia to progress Industry 4.0 standards for the future digital mine
ABB collaboration will enhance interoperability for mining operations management while a process automation test project brings enhanced information exchange to Gold Fields Australia Granny Smith gold mine. "To achieve the objective of a fully connected mine, we are working with ABB and ETP to build an integrated business process and system architecture that will enable visibility of operational activities in near real-time via automated information exchange between various mining systems."
SPECIALTY CHEMICALS

"ABB solutions for integrated paint manufacturing process not only reduced manpower required to operate the plant and production cycle time, but also significantly increases reliability, ultimately resulting in savings, better material usage and reduced losses."

One of the world's largest DCS and MES projects for integrated paint manufacturing process
After rigorous market research, Asian Paints selected ABB for the design, engineering, project management, installation, commissioning and service of the integrated MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) and DCS (Distributed Control System) solutions for its new plant. Having around 42,000 I/Os, it is an end-to-end solution that controls and integrates plant processes from raw material receipt, storage and transportation to paint manufacture and packing.
A SEMICONDUCTOR FACTORY

"We aimed to use as many components from within the ABB group as practical. What emerges from all of this is a true digital factory that won First prize in the “Excellent Location Safeguarding by Digitalization” in the renowned industrial competition

David Hajas, Program Manager

Five-fold productivity gain with fully automated chip-to-module line at semiconductor plant in Switzerland

ABB Ability™ Manufacturing Operations System fully automates production, orchestrating connected technologies incl. state-of-the-art robotics, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), RFID tags, etc

More references by industry

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Cyber security and data ownership

Industrial cyber security guide
ABB's operational excellence solutions support all the deployment variants needed: on premise, on ABB managed or customer manages cloud, on customer private cloud / data center. You own your data. We ensure defence in depth cyber security, data protection, reliability, privacy, intellectual property.

The Cyber Security Reference Architecture is an ABB-developed design standard for industrial systems and associated security controls. ABB engineering teams use the architecture during system deployments, and ABB service units use it to update and modernize existing customer networks to bring them in line with current cyber security standards and best practices.

ABB Ability™ digital services have successfully improved the cyber security of industrial sites across the globe. Many customers have scheduled risk assessments as part of their ongoing annual service agreements, while others have implemented cyber security analytics dashboards to continuously monitor, diagnose and resolve security issues.

Compliance

ABB’s security measures in the Reference Architecture meet or exceed IEC 62443-3-3 security level 2 (SL2) as defined in foundational requirement section 5 (RE5). It also aligns with other common standards such as the NIST framework, ISO 27001 and NERC-CIP. Implementing the reference architecture does not guarantee passage of external certification audits; however, ABB can support compliance for specific security standards with additional recommendations.

Digital transformation partnership: you think big, we get practical.

For every industrial operation ambitious about Industry 4.0, ABB has built a framework to help drive and manage a complex change.
Let's get practical...
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