Digital transformation: Trédi embraces the Internet of Things and big data in Salaise-sur-Sanne

The Trédi waste-to-energy plant in Salaise-sur-Sanne, to the south of Lyon, is a large-scale industrial facility and one of the Séché Environnement Group’s flagship assets. The most complex types of waste are incinerated at the plant, and the heat produced is recovered as steam, which is used to power the industrial heating network that supplies the nearby Roussillon chemical platform. Dozens of sensors record the production data at every step of the process and continuously analyse the emissions. How can the plant make the most of the enormous mass of data generated by the entire system?

In actively pursuing its wide-ranging digital transformation strategy, Trédi turned to Optimistik and its OIAnalytics Operational Intelligence solution, which allows the data to be collected, structured, stored, processed and transformed both automatically and continuously. The information is streamed to functional modules, dashboards, analytical tools, and so on, thereby meeting the needs of the operations teams (operations personnel and process experts), which gives them even greater autonomy.

An “Industry of the Future” project financed jointly by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region

Back in July 2020, the project team submitted an application to the local economic agency as part of the region’s aid scheme entitled “Support my industry of the future project“. Successful applications receive a subsidy up to 50%. Funding from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, which is aimed at facilitating industry’s digital transformation, was awarded in November 2020 and accelerated the project’s development. After setting up the platform for collecting the data specific to our operating tools, the system was transferred to the operators at one of the site’s three units in May 2021. Full-scale testing of the first Operational Intelligence demonstrator, based on IoT technologies (Internet of Things) and big data, proved to be conclusive. The solution allows us to:

·       Collect large amounts of multiple and heterogeneous data from the monitoring systems in real time

·       Transform the data into meaningful “business” information in response to the site’s specific challenges, thereby improving the agility and decision-making capabilities of the operations teams

In addition to the obvious productivity benefit of enabling the operations teams to spend less time on analysing the data, the new data processing solution will allow the teams to significantly reduce production losses and costs. After a few months in service, the demonstrator has already proven its worth, and the solution is now being rolled out across several units in the AURA region.