Oil and Gas Digitalisation: Seven key lessons.
The Event
This blog looks at the seven key digitalisation learnings from The Future Oil & Gas event and how they are transforming the industry. The conference and exhibition event explores how digitalisation, disruption and innovation are shaping the upstream Oil and Gas industry in 2020.
Spartans involvement
Spartan were Silver Sponsors for the two-day event allowing the team to launch our new APM solution PROPHES for Oil & Gas via our virtual stand; this was a company first and exciting experience for us.
Also, John Glen, PROPHES Product Manager, featured on the Predictive maintenance tools to maximise efficiencies and reduce downtime panel with five other Oil and Gas industry guests. The virtual event also gave us the opportunity to debut our new PROPHES Product Video.
Events are a great way to meet delegates, share ideas and catch-up with old friends and contacts. We have missed not being able to meet the wider Oil & Gas community in person, but this was the next best thing and gave us a great platform to launch our new PROPHES software solution.
The seven digitalisation key learnings:
We have seven key findings from the event that focus on the digitalisation of the Oil and Gas industry that we wanted to share:
- Profound and difficult changes have been forced upon us in 2020. However, these changes have made us adapt and seek new ways to work. Digitalisation will be a significant disrupter to the Oil & Gas industry. Chatting to delegates, we understand that the industry can often be slow to embrace change. However, a key take-out from the event is that individuals are prepared to become champions of change to help shape their organisations’ culture to drive change and reap the benefits as early adopters.
- We need a human-centric focus on data. We all know that sensors and machines can produce Terabits of data, but what data is essential to making day to day decisions? Yes, data is key to insightful decision making, but you must focus on the right data. So much data can be collected but what data is a benefit, and what data is a drain on resource and time.
- Applying predictive maintenance to improve equipment reliability is the most significant use case in upstream oil & gas. As Johan Krebbers, VP for Innovation at Shell, quoted in the keynote speech: “It’s all about reducing unplanned downtime!”
- The cloud has arrived in oil and gas. Most operators are now comfortable using public cloud services. It was noted in the Cybersecurity panel that major cloud providers have much more resources to invest in securing data and access than even the supermajors.
- Cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions have built-in advantages over older technologies. SaaS products such as our PROPHES Predictive Maintenance solution are much more cost-effective than traditional on-premise solutions, can be rapidly scaled-up from pilot to full production, don’t need IT teams to set up or maintain and are auto-updated with new features.
- Project teams must be agile and business-focused. Clear business objectives, board support, and short timescales (weeks and months, not quarters and years) are must-haves for digital innovation projects.
- People must be at the centre of change. The Change Management panel explained that between 50 and 70% of project cost and effort should be focused on supporting your people through the change process. The industry needs a new generation of leaders (not bureaucratic project managers) to drive through the many agile projects required to digitise an upstream operation.
Let’s talk
We believe that digital technologies are having a seismic impact on the industry by making upstream equipment more efficient. There is a well of data that is still to be un-tapped, so start a conversation with our specialist Oil & Gas team today to find out more. Visit our O&G page where you can download our complimentary APM toolkit.