How does a relatively small manufacturing technology vendor cope when faced with a major new customer project that is several times larger than anything it's previously been involved with? By getting creative, say officials at real-time performance management software provider OSIsoft Inc., which recently landed a $300 million deal from an arm of the State Grid Corp. of China to deploy its platform at 5,000 power plants.
OSIsoft, a 25-year-old software provider whose PI System is used by process manufacturers and utilities to collect from production environments data that can be used to evaluate performance in real time, will provide software and services to FibrLINK Communications Co. Ltd., the systems integration arm of the State Grid Corp., the largest power provider in China.
The OSIsoft performance management software will be rolled out to 5,000 plants across China over the next seven years. It will be used to create what FibrLINK calls a Supervisory Information System (SIS) database. According to Jun Zha, the chief technology officer of FibrLINK's Energy IT unit, data in the SIS database will be used to determine which plants and equipment are performing well and which are not. The State Grid Corp. will use the information to create performance standards that will help the company improve the output of underperforming plants and equipment. The company will also use the information to perform condition-based maintenance, Zha says.
The PI System deployment is part of China's program to dramatically increase its power production in order to keep up with its substantial economic growth. As China's economy continues to grow in excess of 10% per year, Zha says, the country will need to increase power output by at least 50,000 megawatts per year.
The huge, long-term contract, while welcome news for OSIsoft, also brings challenges. Prior to the FibrLINK deal, OSIsoft's largest deployment -- for customers including the U.S. Department of Energy -- involved about 100 sites. While OSIsoft is confident the PI System can handle the vast amounts of transactions and petabytes of data that the FibrLINK deployment will generate, the company had to concern itself with making sure that all of the PI Systems deployed across China were operating properly at all times.
"How could we be sure that all 5,000 plants were getting the same level of service when they were spread across a very large area?" says Maureen Coveney, OSIsoft's director of business strategy. In the end, OSIsoft officials decided to build a network operations center to deploy the PI System itself and monitor the performance of the FibrLINK SIS system. That approach had been used on a smaller scale by other OSIsoft customers, including agricultural products manufacturer Cargill Inc.
OSIsoft also had to figure out how to provide on-site support for the PI System in China. The company and FibrLINK agreed that OSIsoft would train FibrLINK employees to provide support. Training has now begun, Coveney says.
This article originally appeared in the July 2006 issue of Managing Automation magazine.