The staff of Schneider Electric are offering tours of the future of water solutions throughout WEFTEC 2025 this week in Chicago. A pathway in Schneider’s iconic shade of green takes visitors to several stops all within Schneider’s booth, #2349, at the McCormick Place Conference Center in Chicago.
The first stop is a massive screen highlighting EcoStruxure Water Advisor, a comprehensive suite of management software developed to manage the complete water cycle. This includes aspects from planning and design to operations and maintenance. The suite also pairs aggregated, contextualized data with predictive analytics to optimize water operations.
According to Schneider officials, EcoStruxure allows for real-time enterprise-wide visibility by entirely connecting operations—from the field to the main office—into a single, unified view. This platform drives smarter, data-informed strategies by integrating operational technology, information technology and energy technology.
Shan Subramaniam (pictured), water and wastewater segment leader for Schneider, showed an example of how this software would work for a state-wide water treatment operation.
“It looks at, from a headquarters view, what's my high level KPI of operating assets right down into an asset that I'm operating, like a typical pump,” he said.
EcoStruxure can show users how that pump is performing by tapping into maintenance information coming from an IT data source as well as operational information from an OT data source.
On the next stop of Schneider’s booth tour, Brian Plamondon with Schneider’s Secure Power Division, talked about the solutions the company offers for redundant servers with uninterruptable power supplies.
“Redundancy is a huge deal, and making sure that you have everything stay online despite power going out, that's the biggest piece of the puzzle here,” he said. “I look at it like [a football analogy]. The server is the brains. That's the quarterback, right? They're throwing the big toss. They're making sure all the information gets to where it needs to go. I look at the uninterruptible power supply, like a left tackle. It's the second highest paid player on the team, right? It's the second most important position, because you're keeping the quarterback from getting sacked. That's the same exact way we're making sure that your servers stay up.”
At the next stop, Heleno Linhares discussed Schneider’s work in the shift toward open, software-defined automation (SDA). Unlike traditional systems tied to proprietary hardware, SDA decouples software from hardware, creating an adaptable, vendor-agnostic framework.
Schneider Electric has emerged as a global leader in this transformation. As a founding member of UniversalAutomation.org, Schneider Electric is not only advocating for open standards like IEC 61499, but also actively building solutions that enable them. EcoStruxure offers a modular and flexible approach that allows businesses to modernize legacy infrastructure, scale operations and innovate without the constraints of vendor lock-in.
“Now you are able to develop your application and, only in the end, decide what is the best hardware architecture for your application,” Linhares said. “And this architecture can be hardware from Schneider or any vendor from UniversalAutomation.org.”
On his stop of the tour, Product Application Engineer Thom Chenoweth highlighted Schneider’s latest technology in ultra-low harmonic drives. He said the company’s Altivar Process ATV680 series now offers its smallest footprint yet, taking up 40% less space than its predecessor.
“With this reduction in size, you also lose weight—about 1,000 pounds. You're also going to cut energy usage, and you don't need to cool the room as much,” he added.
On the next stop, Energy Management Software Sales Executive Lauren Krueger discussed Schneider’s etap software, which offers electrical power systems modeling and simulation, optimizing customer electricity power systems based on their digital twin equivalents.
“What's unique about etap is that it can actually map to meters in the field, and it can pull in real-time data,” Krueger said. “So once you have real-time data in a power system study software, you can use that for doing more dynamic simulations, so you're more able to evaluate what's going to happen with your system.”
Krueger also showcased SpecLive Collaborate, a first-of-its-kind platform streamlining the specification development process. This system provides complete, up-to-date information to increase accuracy for architectural, engineering and construction specifications. Developed in partnership with RIB Software, this next-generation platform provides new levels of simplicity, transparency and version control for modern design and engineering firms.
Also highlighted at Schneider’s booth were the company’s motor control centers. Product Manager Jenna Wilkens showed off equipment like the Altivar Process 630, part of the next generation of variable speed drives designed to deliver Industrial IoT benefits. These devices are EcoStruxure-ready solutions that provide built-in intelligence to gather data and share information at the enterprise level. They offer a range from 0.75 kW to 2600 kW in all voltages.
The last stop featured a presentation from Principal Technologist Sahand Iman of Schneider’s AVEVA Process Simulation, which is now available for the water and wastewater industry. This is an integrated platform for engineers and operators to innovate across the entire process life cycle, from design and simulation to training and operations. This solution offers a digital twin with which users can explore all dimensions of a potential design and to quantify the impact on sustainability, feasibility and profitability for each engineering process.
For a deeper look into Schneider’s water solutions, find the team at booth #2349 for a tour, or visit https://www.se.com/us/en/work/solutions/water/.