A trend in O&G industry for outsourcing services for asset health and performance monitoring
1 April 2020
Maintenance, Test & Measurement, Calibration
Public sector industries such as hotels, banking, residential facilities, etc. have been leveraging third-party services (i.e., maintenance, logistics, catering, etc.) for decades. The obvious reason to outsource some of this work is to reduce costs by utilising a third-party expert to execute a service when needed by the customer. In Middle East and Africa, oil & gas (O&G) companies started the outsourcing of assets’ health and performance monitoring decades ago. However, companies have equipment from several OEMs (for pumps, turbines, motors, valves, etc., which makes it difficult to manage these assets in a cost-effective manner. This opens the doors for third-party service companies to address the scope of different OEMs’ assets in a single contract.
In the past, services like this were difficult to execute. Challenges like data infrastructure, data consolidation and available experts were barriers to effectively monitor various assets. Even if companies or third-party service providers were able to acquire data, they had to spend too much time preparing that data to analyse.
Today, in the era of digital transformation, O&G; companies are looking to leverage expert knowledge in real time to lower monitoring costs, improve safety and optimise asset performance and availability.
Emerson, a global industrial automation provider, is addressing the need of the O&G; industry by leveraging the power of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) to deliver the Plantweb Digital Ecosystem. Plantweb leverages data generated by existing or new sensors in a company’s facility and offers analytics tools and secure connectivity to enable scalable monitoring services.
Emerson offers different service types with consistent delivery services.
• Health monitoring: monitoring asset health for sudden changes or alerts. Examples include DeltaV systems, and steam traps.
• Condition monitoring: monitoring for failure conditions on complex assets such as machines, valves and flowmeters.
• Performance monitoring: ensuring that an asset is operating or performing as expected. Examples include flowmeters and analysers.
• Product as a service: providing a full turnkey monitoring solution. Emerson owns and maintains the monitoring equipment and communication network.
• Engineered connected services: custom connected service offerings built specifically for its customer’s needs.
Emerson has worked with a global energy company for implementing a cloud-enabled monitoring solution for the heat exchangers. The connected services solution deployed by the energy company partnering with Emerson was designed to start small, focusing on harvesting and analysing heat exchanger data at one refinery – and even at this scale, the enhanced monitoring solution measurably improved the plant’s operational efficiencies.
The data and recommendations provided by Emerson experts, noted a company representative, helped shift the plant’s maintenance strategy from a reactive to a proactive approach where the appropriate plant personnel are now alerted to issues before they impact operations and are equipped with the information they need to take action. Equally important, refinery personnel are now freed from time-consuming monitoring tasks and can more effectively focus on higher-value functions that benefit overall operations.
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