How Eide Fjordbruk documented that its new sea lice concept works

The goal

Digitalizing aquaculture to improve and innovate faster

Eide Fjordbruk is a family owned fish farming company with ten sites in Western Norway. As one of the first companies in the world to try out the Tubenet production concept, they aim to combat one of the industry's biggest challenges: sea lice.

Fish farming has seen massive innovation in hardware and equipment, but there is still room for better use of the data being generated. With Tubenet, Eide Fjordbruk wanted to learn from data in real time and answer three questions:

• Can data from the process document how efficiently the system combats sea lice?
• Can real-time data show how to best operate the new Tubenet system?
• Can historical data, real-time data and forecasts improve both the technical installation and the operating procedures?

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The challenge

Making industrial data from multiple sources easily available for exploration and collaboration

Fish farming generates biological, environmental, technical and economical data, and everything is interconnected. As in most industries, that data sits in siloed systems and formats, from process control to Excel sheets.

Here the challenge was to combine existing sources with a range of new sensors installed for the Tubenet concept. Gathering the data is one part; making it easy for domain experts to understand and analyse is another. With innovation there are seldom easy answers, so data and domain expertise have to work together.

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The solution

Using Clarify to integrate data sources and give domain experts easy access to explore and understand data

The key to success is making data easily available, so people can focus on analysis and on improving installations and operations.

Eide Fjordbruk already had Clarify installed across all sites. The new Tubenet sensors were quickly integrated and combined with existing data sources, meaning less time and fewer resources needed to turn data into value.

Clarify timelines made it easy to explore and combine data from multiple sources, test hypotheses, learn from historical data and monitor operations in real time. Remote teams can follow the process from afar and discuss with people onsite to get the context needed to truly understand the data.

The results

Faster innovation and better results

• Easy access to explore and collaborate around industrial data. One common interface for everyone from farmer to top management, making it easy to contribute expertise, discover problems and spot opportunities.
• All data in one place, to document and ensure traceability. With enough data gathered, Eide Fjordbruk documented that the system worked as intended, doing applied R&D at commercial scale with in-house expertise.
• Data that improves hardware and operations. Data showed how to improve the Tubenet set-up for the next installation, and revealed operating conditions with a higher chance of sea lice outbreaks so the team could counter them.