FutureOn Today

Digitalization of offshore assets can seem like a leap into the unknown. However, there are many companies making that leap who are beginning to recognizing how going digital can empower them to accomplish more.

Increasingly the excitement around digitalization is prevalent as we meet with operators and service companies. There is now an eagerness to learn how using smart cloud-based digital solutions such as FieldAP can address daily decision-making challenges.

Rising global demand for oil over the past four years has created tight work schedules and an excess of projects to complete. Tighter operating budgets, though, have meant companies are forced to rely on fewer employees in the immediate term to meet this growing work demand. While these existing teams represent the best of talent within the field, they are stretched thin. Previous levels of employment are untenable for most oil and gas companies today, which are intent on showing profits consistently in a favorable price environment, and can’t justify hiring a significant number of new workers. Yet, there is an incredible opportunity to be seized through increasing profits from more yearly project completions – enabled by smartly developing and operating assets digitally with the staff in place.

The smartest and most future-focused, long-term-profit-driven companies are exploring digitalization strategies with FutureOn to drive greater and better thinking from their engineering talent while meeting the business imperative of providing value to bring in revenues.

FieldAP, a cloud-based, real-time 3D visual representation of the subsea field, digitalizes the field planning process. FieldAP enables teams to see more about their assets from every vantage point and every point in time, and make better decisions.

What interests these asset teams most are FieldAP’s real-time 3D digital simulations and visualizations that allow engineers to explore more ideas, more rapidly, in collaboration with colleagues all around the world. Through the power of digitization, engineers can examine multiple possibilities in minutes rather than days, weeks or months required in years past.
Engineers using our 3D digital visualization software can design safe and economic projects in less time than ever before.

Operators’ management teams see the opportunity to make more productive use of their in-house talent as well as to get far more value from their contractors working in FieldAP on their projects.

Contractors savvy enough not to feel threatened by digitization are deploying FieldAP to upstage would-be competitors with faster delivery of more detailed concepts, including design options to give their customers choices they typically would not see at each stage of a project.

And FieldAP is just the beginning for operators and contractors. To further optimize assets, FutureOn’s FieldTwin is a dynamic digital twin that provides real-time information about the status of equipment thanks to sensors connected to the equipment in the field. Over time, the system can identify unacceptable trends in equipment functionality or changes in production rates, taking the guesswork out of maintenance and operations. Simply put, companies throughout the supply chain see the competitive advantages digitization can bring to their unique position in the market, and they are acting proactively to change the game on their peer companies – many of whom will be hard-pressed to play catch-up later.

Ready to see how digitization will help you do more with the talent you have and preempt your competitors? Contact us today for a demo.

The oil and gas industry is no stranger to big data.

However, with larger volumes of oilfield data amassing daily amid intensifying pressure for higher environmental and safety performance, oil and gas companies are turning to digitalization not just for making better sense of the data but to shake business and operations up.

In fact, Norway’s Equinor sees digitalization as a critical element to boosting revenue by $2 billion, reducing offshore drilling costs by 5%, lowering future investment by 30%, improving safety, and reducing the carbon footprint of its operations, according to a June Hart Energy article Energy Companies Give Meaning to Digital Hype.

To parlay digitalization into even bigger returns, Equinor, among other companies, is tapping FutureOn’s oil and gas digitalization expertise to make and see more of the data. At the ONS Conference in Norway, we recently announced a multi-license agreement with Equinor to employ our 100% cloud-based, offshore engineering software FieldAP to gain further experience and test out digital integration with relevant systems in Equinor. This extended agreement on testing out the software follows a successful pilot test carried out last year. FieldAP allows instant data access – no matter where you sit in the world – visualization of the assets in 2D/3D and real-time cost analysis.

But what can companies do with all this digitized and visualized data? How do you let the data work for you?

Make more profitable decisions
Compared to traditional project planning methods, our cloud-based technologies bring real-time data into plain sight through easy-to-use 2D/3D visualization; it’s the next-generation of project planning. With the added benefit to see real-time cost analysis, companies can make forward-thinking, meaningful and prompt decisions. In fact, the digital transformation in the oil and gas sector could unlock $1.6 trillion of value for the industry, according to a 2017 World Economic Forum whitepaper.

Fast-track innovation
Traditionally, disciplines across oil and gas companies work in institutional silos using aggregated data from several different systems. Applying a centralized digital and visual environment deepens collaboration of engineers and project managers, as they work from the same data pool in real-time, offering operational transparency, innovative solutions to issues, engineering workflow improvements and better safety performance.

Open up new revenue opportunities
Data-driven learning across all disciplines of oil and gas companies not only provides better decision making but also can create new business opportunities. In fact, Shell plans to roll out a service in some parts of the world that allows cars to be refueled as they sit in parking lots. Digitalization played a key role in this business opportunity because they could see new ways of delivering gasoline to consumers, according to a recent Hart Energy article Energy Companies Give Meaning to Digital Hype.

Data is at the heart of the digital transformation, so let us put it to work for you. Contact us today, and let’s get your future on.

Executing an oil and gas project on schedule and budget requires a solid foundation of planning. This is no secret.

But for too long, project teams have labored in less than ideal conditions. They’ve long been handicapped by the lack of readily accessible information. Certain documents exist solely – or mostly – on paper, which can further be complicated as new versions of documents are created.

Access to other materials might be restricted by the company.

In fact, Forrester Research has estimated that somewhere between 60% and 73% of data that an enterprise has is not available to the right people for use in making decisions because that data exists in documents, spreadsheets and various backend systems.

As much as collaboration is a goal, navigating information-sharing environments can be difficult and impede the planning cycle. Delays become inevitable. And worse, a persistent norm within the culture that undermines management’s attempts to improve productivity and drive cost efficiency.

It’s been said that project teams may spend as much as two-thirds of their time gathering data and information from a huge number of sources and the scant remainder of their work time acting on the data and planning.

However, a team creating a project plan could significantly accelerate their planning time simply by relying on a single digitized platform in the cloud. A digital platform creates an environment that helps streamline the work, re-work and approvals process.

The upside of using a single digitized platform is more than saving time by making sure the right people have access to the right information when they need it. It means better decisions can be made because team members will have access to the most current analysis and data.

And once the project planning is complete, the information can be updated as maintenance and upgrades occur. The entire digital library of documents for a project can be referred to as the digital twin. Real-time data from Internet of Things-capable sensors can feed into the digital twin to guide decision-making as needed.

Digitization is here. It’s not a concept. But some companies are reluctant to embrace the technology. Of course, some of that is the human’s knee-jerk aversion to change, but there are some potential perceived barriers to success with digitization.

A lack of standards in sensor data reporting can make it difficult to share information across the ecosystem, but such standards are being developed.
Another potential barrier to a company embracing digitization is concern about security breaches in the cloud. However, information stored in the cloud is fundamentally more secure. According to David Linthicum, the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting, there are far fewer attacks on cloud environments than those aimed at on-premises environments.

By opening up to digitization, companies would be able to make decisions based on real-time 3D visualizations of projects. They’d be able to prevent scheduling problems because issues would be more apparent with all the information available in one central repository.

The availability of information would nurture the ability to collaborate across the board, boost knowledge sharing, and improve the quality of communications. The ultimate results for the user are cost savings, reduced time to market, improved operability, and tighter risk management.

Some companies – and woke individuals within – will rightly see the opportunity of early adoption of digital workflows and the risk of being slow to challenge perceived barriers. The less brave will answer for their hesitation – to management, their boards and most certainly to the investors that abandon them for the forward-thinking peer companies whose choice to digitize and train their workforces raised the bar for performance forever.

Ready to get real about breaking down perceived barriers and move your company into the future? Contact us today, and let us help you get your future on.