It is September 2026 which means the Inform Prize is back once again. New teams, new venue, and new ideas - we are excited to see what students have been working on this year! The Inform Prize is an opportunity for teams to take what they have been working on and show it to a real audience: industry professionals, potential future employers, and peers from competing universities. Founded by Intelligent Plant in 2014, the event has grown year on year. Last year, with the help

Power BI is one of the most popular business intelligence tools available, but getting real-time industrial process data from historians and SCADA systems into Power BI has traditionally been a challenge. Intelligent Plant's Power BI Industrial Connector, one of the first Microsoft certified connectors of its kind, solves this directly - bringing process data, alarm KPIs, and event data into your dashboards without data leaving your network.

Alarm rationalisation is a key part of alarm management, but documentation alone has its limitations. This post uses evidence from real industrial assets to highlight the gap between documented operator responses and what actually happens in practice. Intelligent Plant's SEER app helps bridge this gap by visualising actual operator interventions, showing how frequently each response occurs and how often it leads to the alarm clearing.

Not all alarms are equal. Some clear within seconds, others persist for days without needing any action, and some repeat so frequently that operators learn to silence them without thinking. Understanding the difference between standing, fleeting, and chattering alarms - and why each one matters - is the first step towards getting an alarm system properly under control. Bruce Nicolson, Principal Control Systems Engineer at Intelligent Plant, explains.

The best product in the world still needs a business case. A look at why great ideas can die in the boardroom, and why quantifying the cost-benefit is the part that actually gets budget approved.

In May, some of the Intelligent Plant team made the trip to Glasgow for All Energy 2026. With a stand in the NZTC Innovation Hub, a presentation from founder Steve Aitken on secured AI and data sovereignty, and conversations with wind operators, battery manufacturers, and academics, it was one of the better events we have attended. Here is what we got up to and what we took away from it.