Give me an idea of your oil and gas clientele in the region and your scope of work with those companies.
Intergraph Process, Power & Marine has a strong global customer base including most of the big EPC and OO (Owner-Operator) companies worldwide, and we have performed a number of successful project implementations, including in the Middle East region with companies such as Saudi Aramco, Petroleum Development Oman, KNPC, ADNOC Group companies and Petrofac. ARC Advisory Group has ranked Intergraph PP&M as the No1 Overall Worldwide Provider of Engineering Design Tools for Plant Design for ten consecutive years, also for the oil and gas industry.
Elaborate on the work your company does in the Big Data domain, in particular reference to the oil and gas industry?
We want to give to our customers the capability to increase efficiency and velocity to process Big Data. One way will be to reduce the ratio of unstructured information. Accessing and navigating Big Data is another area where we want to provide value to our customers. Working with Big Data and sharing it independently of the physical by moving the Big Data into the Cloud is another key strategy we use to help our customers to create value.
Last but not least, we want to give our customers the capability to bring their Big Data on the field to increase operation and decision making efficiency. Indeed, mobile technology and augmented reality will make the Big Data light and easy to use on day-to-day basis, driving operation efficiency on a level never seen before.
Could you talk about a specific product that your company might have developed in the Big Data space that would help or is helping oil and gas sector companies?
In the unstructured Big Data area, Intergraph SmartPlant Fusion, our engineering information management solution for capturing, organising, linking, and visualising data allows users to ‘unlock’ information from documents and drawings. SmartPlant Fusion also extracts information from 3D models, TruViews and other databases and lists as well as creates an interdisciplinary view portal to the plant information. Bringing all this information together allows to report on the quality of the information and to see if the data is consistent and complete.
Regarding accessibility of Big Data, Intergraph SmartPlant Enterprise Portal will give the capability to navigate inside the information, from tags to documents or to 3D models, and to find the information quickly independent of the size of the big data.
By making Big Data ready for change, The SmartPlant Enterprise suite of solutions supports the whole plant life cycle, during which both EPCs and OOs can greatly benefit from managing their asset information.
SmartPlant Enteprise enables an integrated project delivery through applying a rule-based philosophy that empowers EPCs to comprehensively master their work processes within the system. It simultaneously enables powerful intelligent design, project customisation, and change management with integrated, out-of-the-box solutions.
For OOs, SmartPlant Enterprise offers templates based on unique and pre-configured owner operator work processes. Furthermore, it allows an integration with other leading third-party OO systems for maintenance, reliability, etc, and provides data exchange with contractors and suppliers, capturing unstructured information, validation, transformation, and loading of data exchanged to facilitate project execution throughout the project value chain.
Moving the Big Data into the Cloud will facilitate the following:
• Reduced capital expenditure: The money that would have been spent on buying, maintaining and upgrading infrastructure can instead be reserved for investment in resource-producing assets.
• Faster project start-up: A project environment can be up and running in weeks, rather than months.
• Improved collaboration: All project participants have easy access to relevant data, reducing rework between the project phase and handover.
• Procurement, construction, and operations advantages: Cloud provides better opportunity for greater material consolidation and construction sequence planning, and more effective and timely operations training.
• Smoother project handover: Every engineering company has its own system and standards, which are not necessarily compatible with that of the plant owner’s. This can cause immense issues at the handover stage and through operations and maintenance.
We can already bring Big Data on the field with the SmartPlant for Owner-Operators mobile solutions. These enable bringing documents and 3D models to the field, or help to support dedicated workflows, such as inspection or commissioning. Augmented reality is also knocking the door, demonstrable prototypes are already available and formal products will be released on the market in the coming months.
