Dubai, UAE, 22nd April 2021: AVEVA, a global leader in industrial software, driving digital transformation and sustainability, highlighted how the acceleration of digital is transforming the energy industry in a post-pandemic landscape. AVEVA CEO Craig Hayman, who spoke at CERAWeek 2021, is championing the rapid digital evolution of the energy sector to drive transformative change as workers have been forced to adapt new digital tools for remote work, the status quo has clearly been disrupted.
Digital innovation through the use of predictive analytics to better anticipate the future, data to better inform current decisions in the here and now, and digitisation and automation to deliver cost efficiencies and speed is driving renewed growth in energy organisations globally. Organisations that have pivoted to digital successfully, are already generating up to 2 and 10 percent improvement in expanded production and up to 30 percent savings in cost.
PwC’s “2020 Digital Operations study for energy: Oil and gas” report found that the main barriers of the implementation of changes provided by digitalisation are due to limited knowledge sharing (77%), insufficient digital training (74%) and a lack of digital talent (72%). Regarding the lack of digital talent, 2019 data from oil and gas companies, collected by KPMG, found that chief information officers (CIOs) feel there are skills shortages in business analysis (47%), big data/analytics (41%), artificial intelligence (37%), cybersecurity (35%) and enterprise architecture (33%).
A Transforming Energy Sector Is Generating New Demands
Hayman says that the energy sector will undergo a ‘wholesale transformation’, where trust, partnership and the human journey will be absolutely key. “As an industry, we’re at the start of the journey – there are more transformative behaviours to come as well as silos that need to be broken down”, he said. “Even in times of rapid change, energy companies’ two most valuable assets remain their people and their data”.
“Integrating human insight and operational information including the way that we design, build and run assets can evolve to be more efficient, intelligent and sustainable. We believe that the future mix will be defined by what we call the three Ds: demand, digitalisation and ongoing disruption”, Hayman commented.
Industrial technology is key to realizing a more resource-efficient value chain and will support circularity as well as enable the transition to renewables and low-carbon energy. Digital tools, powered by human insight, can leverage integrated data and analytics to realise the energy company of the future more quickly and efficiently and that is why AVEVA is working with leading EPCs and owner-operators to make efficient, intelligent operations a reality.
According to IDC, a new era of efficiency and profitability is upon the oil and gas industry as the advantage Internet of Things (IoT) provides to the industry is improving the business productivity and reducing cost, which is a game changer as it creates new competitive advantage. IDC predicts that that IoT investments will rise though partnership with technology companies that have proven solutions to deliver improve efficiency and profitability while combating risk and security threats. The critical success factors are now to deliver value to the business and increase return on investments (ROI). Leadership and corporation need to be established between IoT Vendors and Oil & Gas in order to handle adoption that meets organisational goals.
“As markets continue to evolve, the pace of change will also accelerate, and the possible gains are increasing. Combining information and artificial intelligence with human insight is crucial to optimising engineering and operations to drive performance intelligence, and support the energy transition”, Hayman concluded.
