Beyond Great by Arindam Bhattacharya

Author:Arindam Bhattacharya [Bhattacharya, Arindam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Platform Pathway #3: Collaboratively Create and Amplify Solutions to a Global Customer Base

Global data architectures and cloud-based data platforms allow companies to instantly deploy new solutions in domains and geographies that previously would have been out of reach. A third pathway companies are pursuing to grasp the opportunity generated by global data is to use these platforms to look for patterns in the data, identify potential innovations that might benefit particular customers, develop these solutions, and then quickly spread these solutions to specific groups of customers around the world to unlock exponential value. Such a use of cloud-based platforms amounts to a completely new community-based way of solving problems, one in which experts from a vast array of fields build on one another’s capabilities to produce pathbreaking, elegant, and efficient solutions that no one entity working alone could have engineered.

One company that has mobilized a cloud platform to create and disseminate new solutions rapidly and at scale is the French energy company Schneider Electric. Historically, the company has acquired, stored, and used data in a fragmented way, segregating it according to its products and services or the regions in which it operates. It has also treated data as exhaust, capturing it in select instances and analyzing it after the fact to optimize operations. More recently, as value has migrated toward digital solutions, the company has sought to develop a capacity for building and deploying a wide range of solutions quickly and at scale.

The company’s first step was to create its EcoStruxure platform—an open, scalable, and interoperable IoT architecture that “enables Schneider Electric, its partners and end-user customers to develop scalable and converged IT/OT solutions that deliver innovation at every level to an organization or enterprise.”47 This architecture allowed Schneider Electric to engage with a broad spectrum of participants in its ecosystem and to collect data off devices. Customers could also use software on the platform to better deploy the equipment they had purchased—what the company called “smart operations”—and to access applications, services, and more from Schneider Electric via the cloud.48 As of 2018, some 650,000 local partners were using the platform, working with Schneider Electric on developing new solutions. In 2018, the company was managing some two million assets around the world on the platform and using EcoStruxure to help customers reduce their CO2 emissions. The company was well on its way to achieving its 2020 goal of reducing emissions by 120 million metric tons.49

In addition to EcoStruxure, Schneider Electric in 2019 launched another platform called Schneider Electric Exchange, billed as “the world’s first cross-industry open ecosystem dedicated to solving real-world sustainability and efficiency challenges.”50 “We’ve always had an ecosystem and network of partners,” Schneider Electric’s chief digital officer, Herve Coureil, told us, “which has proved to be a very strong asset in the past. As we went digital, we wanted to continue the same and hence built Schneider Electric Exchange, which allows a wide variety of partners to leverage our platforms to collaborate and build solutions for our customers. We didn’t want to be at the center of the ecosystem, but to orchestrate it.

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