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As an expert organization, the CONENGA Group has in-depth technical know-how in the optimization of combustion and industrial production processes. In the service area of management consulting, there is broad experience in strategy work from numerous customer projects. This knowledge is now also being used to shape the company’s own direction – employees are switching to the exciting role of in-house consultants for this purpose.

Design framework for strategy work

Barbara Eschbacher and Johann Sauermann worked on and planned the objectives of the strategy work, the procedure and the documentation of the results in coordination with the management. And one point should receive special attention: namely, the increase of self-responsibility among all employees. Everyone should be able to sharpen their understanding of the strategy and contribute their share to its implementation.

Independent preparation in teams – Artistry on the high wire

As is so often the case with strategy, it’s all about finding the right balance. In this specific case, the right mix of central requirements from management with individual contributions from employees.

After the information phase in February, the team should therefore become more active in this phase of strategy work. Dazu wurden vier Gruppen gebildet, die eigenverantwortlich zu zugewiesenen Schwerpunktthemen einen jeweils einstündigen Block für den Strategietag vorbereiten. All necessary contents, analyses and deepenings are to be prepared independently by the teams – including preparation of the presentation, discussion with moderation, documentation and preparation of the results.

Joint consolidation on strategy day – showdown in the team

Obwohl Strategiearbeit als laufender Prozess gesehen wird, sollte der Status aus den einzelnen Gruppen an einem gemeinsamen Strategietag zusammengeführt und ausgetauscht werden. So in mid-June, the entire team gathered at the Springer-Schlössl in Vienna to inform and inspire each other on the elaboration and implementation status. Expectations were correspondingly high and complex.

To further increase the excitement, an additional assignment was given to the groups at the opening of the strategy day: in addition to the presentation of the group results, the topic of leadership and corporate culture is to be prepared and introduced in a scenic presentation. Once again, it is important to ensure the right balance – that is, to create a balance between the well-planned and the spontaneous. This challenges the participants accordingly, brings important energy and attention as well as content complexity.

Outlook for the next steps

The strategy day made it clear how broad the competencies of the employees are and how strong the team is as a whole. The preparation of the contents, including the very different forms of active processing in the plenum as well as the expressive – and sometimes humorously light scenic presentations – have made you want to learn more.

So over the summer, work will continue in the four groups and content will be added. The transfer of the topics to the regular processes is planned for the fall, and the monitoring of the implementation will be anchored. Because that’s where the balance has to be struck again – this time between ongoing day-to-day business and the implementation of strategic focus topics. We are looking forward to the next steps on our common path!

Calculate your potentials!

To better quantify the heat recovery potential in biomass cogeneration plants through a flue gas condensation unit, an interdisciplinary team from the fields of process engineering, mathematics and digitalization at CONENGA Group has developed a web-based tool.

Flue gas condensation plays a major role in increasing fuel efficiency and thus getting more usable heat from the fuel. Overall, this also reduces emissions. Some of our customers are already using this technology, while others are considering retrofitting their plant with it. With the tool you can of course also calculate heat recovery potentials without condensation part.

Fig.1: Heat recovery in a flue gas condensation plant leads to maximum possible fuel efficiency

With the flue gas condensation potential estimation, the review of existing plants is made possible and first decision steps for new plants can be set. In addition to calculating the expected potential, it is also possible to display comparative cases with different scenarios directly in the tool. By entering the actual operating parameters, you can, for example, understand the effects of fuel-water content, residual oxygen content in the flue gas and return temperature of the district heating network on the potential of your plant.

The tool is part of a series of process engineering models that we use in our CONENGA Performance Cloud for online diagnosis of process engineering conditions and continuous improvement of your plant. We have now “extracted” a part of it and make it available to you free of charge.

If you would like to improve the heat recovery potential of your plant or are thinking about retrofitting, we invite you to try our tool free of charge. A one-time registration is all you need to get started.

Simply visit the following website: https://tools.conengagroup.com

We are looking forward to your feedback! Teilen Sie uns auch gerne mit, welche weiteren Berechnungen für Sie von besonderem Interesse sind. We will gladly take your input into account when developing the next tools we would like to make available to interested parties in the future.

Thanks for using it and have fun optimizing!

Your CONENGA Group Development Team

Many of our customers, and we as well, require flexible, above all scalable solutions in the digitization strategy in order to transfer process data. If data is sent to several sites, the MQTT protocol is a good choice.

But how do you design a solution to provide the different stakeholders in the company with just the data they need for their area? In response, we developed an MQTT cluster with multiple redundant nodes last year, which has been live since January 1, 2023, and which we would like to present here.

How does our MQTT cluster function?

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a protocol that allows a client and a server to communicate with each other. In short, a protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). MQTT offers a lot of advantages in data transmission – such as sparse data volume and TLS encryption, so there is no need for external encryption via VPN.

Clients send their data to specific “topics” at the broker and in return can “subscribe” to desired topics, similar to a newsletter subscription. The clients can be organized in star topology, so new clients can be added especially easily. This results in a highly scalable solution, a well thought-out topic structure is mandatory for this!

This Message Oriented Middleware solution (MOM) enables us to provide our customers with a reliable interface between IT and OT!

All the complexity remains hidden from the client. From his perspective, there is simply a highly available MQTT connection over which data can be exchanged between different devices and applications.

Failure and IT security

In addition to the aforementioned encrypted data transmission using TLS, the MQTT-CLuster itself has a multi-redundant design and is thus built as a highly available, scalable decentralized architecture solution that we make available to our customers.

With this architecture, which was developed on the basis of MQTT, VerneMQ and internal encryption with Nebula, many of the previous restrictions can be thrown overboard. This not only eliminates the risk of a single-point-of-failure, but also allows us to quickly and easily scale horizontally if necessary, i.e. we expand the cluster with additional MQTT nodes when the load is higher in order to distribute the load evenly.

This is how you can imagine it…

Gaining information from data, made easy!

Large, unwieldy Excel files that are difficult to maintain and in which errors that are difficult to recognize creep in again and again are now a thing of the past.

With the help of the MQTT cluster, it is now possible to transmit, store and evaluate live all process and production values from different locations every second! Reports, live KPI’s, alarms, OEE values and much more can be generated and calculated via a connected information platform.

Damit werden Reportprozesse auf allen Ebenen des Unternehmens um ein Vielfaches vereinfacht, die Reportgenauigkeit nimmt signifikant zu, da die notwendigen Berechnungswerte direkt von der Datenquelle live herangezogen werden.

Highlights:

• We transfer data in real time and can do without a VPN connection.
• We simply collect the data in databases and can make it available without major hurdles, develop models, perform analyses faster, and also provide our controls on the PLC with calculations ranging from soft sensors to elaborate AI tools.
• And last but not least, we can also make them tangible for our customers – with the specially developed web-based data platform.

…and that’s why we love MQTT!