ASSET PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT, ANALYTICS, DIGITALIZATION AND AUGMENTED REALITY

Dr. Kang Ju Lee, Technical Sales Leader for Asia Pacific at Aveva, discusses asset performance management, digitalization, augmented reality, and the company’s recent merger with Schneider Electric’s industrial software business.

Tell our readers about Aveva.

Aveva is a global leader in engineering and industrial software driving digital transformation across the asset and operational lifecycle of capital-intensive industries. The company’s engineering, planning and operations, asset performance, and monitoring and control solutions serve over 16,000 customers across the globe.

Our customers are supported by an industrial software ecosystem that includes 4,200 partners and 5,700 certified developers. Aveva is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with over 4,400 employees at 80 locations in over 40 countries.

What is the latest news?

Schneider Electric recently merged its industrial software business with Aveva. This integrates Aveva’s design, engineering and construction capabilities with Schneider Electric’s industrial software business, which includes capabilities that range from simulation to real-time manufacturing operations management. It creates a path to digitalization from conceptual design to commissioning, and from operations back to revamps. Customers can benefit from improved profitability, efficiency and performance.

How important is digitalization?

Some 88% of leaders in capital-intensive industries say that digitalization would increase their revenues. Yet less than half of these companies are in the process of adopting a digital strategy. Digitalization demands a fundamental rethink of the way organizations operate. Companies need to be confident that their technology investment will deliver a high return on capital and lower the total cost of asset ownership.

What do you offer the turbomachinery industry?

Turbomachinery is critical to any oil and gas facility. Due to the asset-intensive nature of the industry, any slight improvement in asset utilization can result in a huge gain in revenue and cashflow. Therefore, keeping these operating assets running with minimum unplanned outages is key to improving profitability and maximizing returns on projects. However, maintaining uptime can get harder over time due to changes in loading profiles when oil and gas production rates decline. Aveva offers a way to maximize uptime.

How is this achieved?

Our Predictive Asset Analytics solution enables modelling of equipment performance using pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms to identify and diagnose potential operating issues days or weeks before failures happen. Operating models, including past loading, ambient and operational conditions, are created through advanced process modelling and simulation.

An asset signature is created for turbines, compressors, pumps or any other critical piece of equipment. Real-time operating data is compared against these models to detect subtle deviations from expected equipment behavior, allowing reliable and effective monitoring of different types of equipment with no programming required. Early warning notification allows reliability and maintenance teams to assess, identify and resolve the problems.

In what other ways can asset performance management assist turbomachinery operators?

As oil and gas production fields are often in remote locations, it can be challenging to inspect and maintain non-instrumented assets. Having accurate data and information available is the foundation to optimizing asset performance. Our Mobile Operator Rounds leverage a platform to facilitate inspections and reliability checks of assets in a thorough and fully verifiable manner, delivering the data you need to keep your assets productive and operating at peak efficiency.

What best practices do you recommend?

Implementing asset performance management solutions can greatly assist in turbomachinery operations and maintenance. Whether the maintenance and operations team has a maintenance strategy in place today, or is looking to implement a more robust and holistic solution, there are toolsets available in the market, such as condition-based maintenance, predictive analytics and mobile solutions to empower the workforce.

Predictive analytics software uses pattern recognition and machine learning for early warning detection and diagnosis of equipment problems to prevent failures and ensure high performance.

What trends do you see driving companies to digitalize their asset management?

Ageing demographics within the industrial sector is leading to a scarcity of skilled workers to properly maintain specialized equipment. Thus, companies are seeking digital solutions to enable more efficient monitoring of specialized equipment with fewer skilled workers.

In addition, technology evolution, via the Internet of Things (IOT), big data, cloud infrastructure, analytics and mobility, is in high demand. Companies in the turbomachinery sector view these technologies as a way to reduce costs and to take operational efficiencies to the next level.

What trends do you see developing in asset management?

There is growing adoption of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in training. Unlike a traditional classroom environment, VR facilitates interaction between equipment and the environment, as well as providing a simulation close to actual conditions.

This accelerates the transfer of knowledge and rapid learning of best practices. Operators can practice operating procedures of real experiences until they achieve perfect execution in a safe and controlled classroom environment. Trainees get up to speed earlier with better retention and can hit the ground running in a production setting.

How applicable could this be to maintenance?

Utilization of AR technology in maintenance activities allows field operators to quickly access and visualize performance data of the operating assets at a remote site. This facilitates inspection and troubleshooting without the need to rely on inefficient communications to get information from the DCS operators at the control room.