What Fuels Plant Asset Management?

With the oil and gas industry operating in increasingly remote geographical locations, harsher environmental conditions, employing newer and unconventional processes for extraction, the importance of managing physical assets has started sinking in and managing these assets has become critical. This has in turn enabled a wholistic approach; one that is more balanced and inclusive of well-planned hand-offs, healthy asset management in the areas of operations and maintenance and balanced project requirements of risk, cost and schedule.

The importance of physical asset management to a company’s success has increased over recent decades. Automation is one reason for this trend, as it has forced industries to delegate more tasks to machines, thus making maintenance more crucial. The perceived significance of maintenance by management spans a wide variety of perspectives. Some see it as merely repairing broken equipment in a plant; others take a broader view and see it as critical to a firm’s profitability.

It is well known that Oil and Gas companies struggle with asset management challenges that traditional approaches don’t address. Often systems and people simply aren’t communicating. But when it comes to increasing asset life, planning shutdowns and reducing manual interventions, the need of the hour is a real-time collaboration across teams. With the intelligent asset management solution for oil and gas from global majors, companies can improve collaboration, monitor asset condition and proactively manage their assets. These intelligent asset management solutions provide an unified platform that links information from the plant, financial and operational control systems to gain more complete information about assets and a more cohesive, time-based view of the operations. The solution then connects the need – to know people and systems, giving these stakeholders information needed to take informed decisions to optimize the efficiency and productivity of the plant operations. Typically these kinds of solutions provide advanced analytics and intelligence tools to help predict plant performance and equipment health using key performance indicators. Thus monitoring performance, setting targets and optimizing resources are highly enabled, delivering plant costs benefits. This facilitates intelligent evaluation and enhancement of oil and gas operations to reach desired production levels, identify possible ways to reduce costs, mitigate risk, optimize outage scheduling and comply with environmental regulations more easily.

Most oil and gas companies agree that their significant challenge is management of information. Oil and gas companies therefore are actively involved in continuing to work to create reliable intelligence from the massive amount of technical and business data, both structured and unstructured, that they have collected during the life of the company. Thus the focus is on accessing / documenting and managing key Plant Asset Data to improve decision making across the entire enterprise from the exploration & production stage up to the refining stage.

blog authored by Subramaniyan S,
Director – Plant Design Engineering
Strategic Services Group