Nexans Partners with Schneider Electric on Digital Transformation Program

March 24, 2021

Nexans has partnered with Schneider Electric on a joint program to take its digital journey to the next level. The aim is to accelerate the transformation of Nexans into a business driven by clear, rich and actionable data as the foundation for improved business performance, safety and flexibility. The digitalization of its factories will further improve the efficiency of production lines, enable predictive maintenance and reduce carbon emissions. It will also contribute to the Group’s commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. Customers for Nexans’s cable products and services will experience the benefits of the program through enhanced products availability.

Nexans decided to collaborate with Schneider Electric after witnessing the successful roll-out of its digital transformation program across more than 115 sites worldwide. Applying a philosophy of “Think big. Act small. Scale fast”, yielded impressive results. These include an up to 80 per cent reduction in maintenance time by implementing predictive maintenance solutions as well as a 15 per cent reduction in energy costs.

“Nexans has already embraced digitalization in many areas of our business, using 3-D printing, big data and virtual reality. Now, the time is right to take our digital journey to the next level so that the benefits could be realized by all industrial assets worldwide“, says Christopher Guérin, CEO of Nexans. “Partnering with Schneider Electric will allow us to advance rapidly in Industry 4.0 opportunity field, and leveraging their global footprint and technology to deploy solutions across all our sites and to accelerate our carbon neutrality.” 

“Schneider Electric is supporting the transition to a more electric and digital world that will meet the challenges of the climate crisis”, says Christel Heydemann, Executive Vice President, France Operations, Schneider Electric. “We are honoured to become the digital partner of Nexans for its operational efficiency and sustainability. Thanks to our EcoStruxure platform, we will enable Nexans to take data-driven decisions to increase business performance and achieve its carbon neutrality journey.”

Today’s industrial innovation is driven by powerful software and data analytics that increases both productivity and sustainability. Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure platform gives industrial enterprises focused insights to understand process and operational data and uniquely enables common cross-function, live monitoring and application data sharing. This leads to faster improvements in operational performance, improved quality control, reduction in energy and raw materials use, better maintenance and increased profitability. 

The Nexans collaboration with Schneider commenced in October 2020 with a local diagnosis of two pilot plants in Europe. It has focused on monitoring energy usage and predictive, condition-based maintenance. The aim has been to identify improvement initiatives that will yield a return on investment in less than three years. Globally, the pilot program has also audited Nexans’s current information technology and operational technology to establish the best systems to deploy for the future.

The conclusion of the two plants diagnosis, will be used to develop a long-term plan to take the digital transformation to a number of major Nexans sites worldwide. 

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