Operational resilience – Five key trends on how digital innovation will protect profit

Spartan solutions, PROPHES Product Manager, John Glen was recently asked to present a webinar on Operational resilience, focusing on digital innovation at the Oil and Gas Technology centre. The OGTC has a clear strategy for the O&G industry, working with cross-industry organisations to support technology development that will solve key industry challenges. 

Tech20 Virtual is a series of weekly webinars featuring world-leading experts – exploring the latest tech trends, asking big questions and sharing big ideas. John’s presentation focused on how improving operational resilience via digital innovation will support Operator profitability through cyclical and structural changes, like Covid-19.  

A video of the full presentation will be available soon. However, this blog will focus on the five key trends which came from the participants Q&A: 

1. Paperless Working.  Digital tools are replacing paperwork as the pandemic forces us all to change the way we work. Processing paper is very inefficient and does not work well when physical offices are understaffed.  If you analyse the amount of paperwork currently used for an offshore maintenance work pack (for example), there are significant opportunities for Oil and Gas companies to streamline work flowing through the North Sea supply chain.
2. Internal barriers to change.  Traditional approaches to Operations and Maintenance will not work in the ‘new normal’. Maintenance teams need to rebuild work plans from the ground up and ensure every activity delivers real value.   Time–based maintenance scheduling will increasingly be replaced with real-time predictive analytics.  Conservative, risk–averse ‘waterfall’ IT projects must be replaced with agile, fast and cost-effective change management projects that aggressively embrace and manage risk.
3. Agile solution delivery.  Agile project delivery was pioneered in the tech industry but is increasingly used in industrial sectors.  Agile projects put the user and stakeholders at the centre of every activity.  Agile projects embrace the fact that not everything is knowable at the beginning of a new technology project.  Agile manages this risk by being fast (delivery in weeks or months, not years) and providing frequent and tangible feedback to the customer
   
4. Learnings from other industry.  We recently completed an agile project to digitise the operations of a leading European equipment rental company.  The project was launched with a short three-month pilot to prove the concept and get buy-in from end–users and stakeholders.  The pilot was followed by a brief productionisation phase (to implement user feedback) and then a six-month training, change management and rollout programme to hundreds of users.  The customer team had one board–level sponsor supported by a process owner, project leader and super-user.  
5. Taking the jump.  The Oil and Gas industry has a significant challenge to re-establish profitability and long-term sustainability.  The ‘new normal’ of fluctuating prices and remote working will force considerable change on all producers.  The Spartan team advocate using agile methodologies, and cloud solutions like our PROPHES Predictive Maintenance service, to manage this change.
    

To learn more about Spartan’s predictive maintenance solution PROPHES, please click here to start a conversation with our team.