NEWS
From intern to SilverBridge
Awesome Projects winner
Siemens takes
Digital Solutions
of the Year
Award at Africa
Utility Week
Marco Rahne (left) and Johan Helberg
receive the award on behalf of Siemens
S
iemens has won the Digital Solutions
of the Year Award for its South Africa
headquarters microgrid project at the Africa
Utility Week Industry Awards that took place
in Cape Town.
SilverBridge developer
Tsundzukani Davi
Mhlongo
ilverBridge developer Tsundzukani Davi
Mhlongo has walked away with the
first prize in the customer category award
at the annual SilverBridge Awesome
Projects campaign. S require extensive training to learn how
the products work and how to resolve the
validation errors. SmartGrid makes the
process more effective as users do not
need to search where the errors are. The traditional power grid provides reliable
power most of the time, but when natural
disasters or security breaches threaten
the grid, the ensuring blackouts can be
catastrophic and costly.
His SmartGrid solution simplifies the way
Exergy users resolve validation errors. “When I started working at SilverBridge,
I played around on the system and
familiarised myself with it,” said Mhlongo. It is for this reason that organisations
and utilities are working together to build
resilient, flexible power systems called
microgrids. Operating either as part of
traditional grid or independently (or both),
microgrids are revolutionising the way we
manage our energy resources.
“Tsundzukani joined SilverBridge as an
intern in 2016 following which he was
appointed as a permanent staff member.
This illustrates just how effective the
Awesome Projects internal campaign is in
unlocking the potential of our employees
irrespective of their job level or areas of
expertise,” said Claudette Steynberg,
Product Manager at SilverBridge.
Exergy is the foundation that SilverBridge
develops complex products. Each of
these contain a comprehensive list of
input parameters that are validated to
ensure that acceptance criteria are met.
As part of this, a list of errors and error
combinations are set up by configurators
to make sure that the input parameters
are captured correctly.
Users often struggle to resolve these
errors as they are mostly technical. They
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INTELLIGENTCIO
“I created a policy and tried to validate it
but received a list of errors which I could
not resolve. This proved to be the basis of
my idea to create a double click function
on the error grid to take me directly to
where the error occurred.”
He believes that the Awesome Projects
campaign provides employees with the
opportunity to come up with new ideas
to improve the business and how clients
work with the system.
“Awesome Projects lets employees think
creatively on addressing the challenges
our users face with the system,” he said.
“This results in creating a more user-
friendly environment and sees us thinking
differently about how our work impacts
others and how effectively they can
complete their job functions.”
A microgrid is a scaled-down version of the
centralised power system and can generate,
distribute and control power in a campus
setting or small community.
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They are reliable and flexible
They are resilient
They more secure
They save money
They store and incorporate
renewable energy
Siemens provides a comprehensive portfolio
of products solutions and services to help
build and operate microgrids of any size.
It supplies generation and distribution of
electrical energy, as well as monitoring and
controlling of microgrids.
www.intelligentcio.com