Cognite Data Fusion® and Microsoft Sustainability Manager provide simple access to complex industrial data

Have you ever sat down to complete a jigsaw puzzle without the final reference image you’re piecing together? As you turn over each piece, you may identify general patterns in color or shape, but you’d be hard-pressed to make satisfying progress.

This is what it feels like for manufacturing and industrial teams to move toward sustainability without a clear picture of all their energy and emissions data. Around the world, large industrial and manufacturing data comes from myriad formats, numerous vendors, and third-party systems, and includes both modern and legacy solutions. This data dispersal means employees spend more time searching for data and gathering sources than acting on their findings. All of this makes sustainability efforts reactive at best, near impossible at worst, as companies lack data-driven insights that would empower confident decision-making. 

Sustainability is, then, a data problem exacerbated by siloed sources and complex systems. “At the moment, most operators do not have a line of sight to what the carbon impact is of any decision they make while they’re operating their facilities or doing their work,” says Carolina Torres, Executive Director of Energy Industry Transformation. “You need to have data operations capability. You can’t do it with regular data management the way we’ve been doing it."

Cognite Data Fusion^® solves the problem by not only collecting all of an organization’s existing asset data in a single view but also contextualizing that data to create a complete digital representation of the full industrial reality—enabling companies to unlock meaningful insights and make data-driven decisions that drive sustainability efforts. By doing so, Cognite Data Fusion^® empowers a high-tech sustainable and profitable industrial future. Cognite also makes industrial and manufacturing data organized and searchable—so that users can find internal information as readily as they would find an open lunch spot on a search engine. “Industry is waiting for its iPhone moment. What Cognite Data Fusion intends to do is bring that level of ease and functionality and insight generation to the industrial world,” says Torres.

Moving from visibility to action with Microsoft 

Industrial data spans everything from the specific usage and performance of individual pieces of equipment to energy outputs for entire regional ecosystems. As industrial teams commit to sustainability practices in their organizations, they look for partners who can help them sharpen their approach to increasing efficiencies and reducing energy consumption with rich, actionable insights. 

Cognite was already using Microsoft Azure to deploy solutions for production, maintenance, and reliability, so working together on a sustainability solution through the Microsoft Sustainability Manager felt like a natural next step. By collaborating on sustainability initiatives specifically, Cognite was able to evolve its solutions to meet increasing demands for tools that help companies achieve ambitious sustainability goals by making data-driven decisions. “Microsoft Sustainability Manager had all the templates and the reference data around converting to regulatory reporting,” says Torres, which Cognite Data Fusion^® did not have but would need to develop to empower industrial businesses with daily reporting and insights. “All of the strengths that Cognite Data Fusion^® brought and all of the strengths that Microsoft Sustainability Manager could bring created this really great combination between the two,” says Torres.

Cognite Data Fusion^® fuses dispersed data inputs, collecting many data sources into a cohesive, contextualized view without losing the critical nuances and granular details that inform each puzzle piece. In fact, it adds even more detail to the bigger picture. This enriched data can then be fed into Microsoft Sustainability Manager to reveal connections, weak spots, and opportunities for teams to identify problems and act. Machine learning within Cognite Data Fusion^® ensures that data remains clearly labeled and organized: “The data is normalized and enriched and contextualized, which adds connections between the different data sources,” explains Torres. Teams are also empowered to take informed action with simulation-based decision support that includes optimizations, what-if scenarios, and forecasting. All this leads to nuanced reporting from Sustainability Manager that empowers teams to make smarter, proactive decisions.

Visualize a big future with big picture data

Beyond solving industrial data problems, Cognite takes a big-picture approach to building trust as they strive to make data more actionable while ensuring it remains tested and trusted. “Data is only as valuable as it is used and trusted,” says Torres. As Generative AI technology continues to evolve, Cognite sees enormous opportunities to use AI to enhance data modeling and contextualization and enable decision-makers to interact with sophisticated, smart data sets using a native-language Copilot, increasing time-to-value. Cognite envisions a future where generative AI, data analytics, and asset management “work together to continuously improve the data reliability, amount, contextualization, and the codification of the knowledge that workers have,” says Torres. As technologies evolve, Cognite ensures data continues to form a reliable, trusted center from which meaningful action can be inspired.

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