Digital transformation is a hot topic of industrial upgrading, and it is also a systematic project. It requires top-level design of leadership and the need to cultivate one's own digital talent team to support it. Finally, it is necessary to explore scenario needs and solve work problems with business needs as the main focus.
compiled | Yezicai Zijin
When we search for the oil exploration and development situation in Southeast Asian countries, there is no shortage of information related to "secretly extracting China's South China Sea oil resources".
Today, let’s not talk about the oil exploration and development situation in the South China Sea, we follow SPE’s report to see how Southeast Asian oil and gas companies embrace the digital revolution at a time when digitalization is sweeping the entire oil and gas industry.
In the past few years, Petronas (Petronis Maracia), Shell Malaysia (Shell Malaysia ), and PTTEP (Thailand PTT Exploration and Production Co., Ltd.) have launched digital projects with the aim of improving workflows and final results in exploration, development and production. This change is accompanied by many growing pains and lessons learned through repeated trial and error.
However, the management responsible for overseeing and implementing digitalization hopes to minimize this "growth worries" as much as possible. This is especially true for Petronas, a comprehensive state-owned enterprise, a major oil producer in Malaysia and an important source of national revenue. Therefore, the company does not want to take too many risks.
So, how do they carry out digital transformation? What are the advantages for us?
01. Top-level design
In 2017, Petronas' president and CEO of Tan Sri Wan zulkiwan Ariffin made digitalization the focus of the company's growth plan, marking that Petronas' official embraces digital transformation.
As part of the implementation of digital transformation, Petronas established the Center of Digital Excellence in 2017, led by Chief Digital Information Officer Wan Shamilah Saidi. The company integrates all digital plans into one platform with a focus on project development, so different departments can work together to avoid fighting each other.
"I don't think we have to develop everything from scratch," said Nasir HJ Darman, chief technology officer of Petronas, at the SPE executive executive forum with digitalization as its core issue. The company's digital transformation plan includes internal incubation, external collaboration and direct acquisitions.
Nasir further explained that the company's digital strategy starts at the top, and they are responsible for guiding project development and encourage engineers and scientists to come up with specific ideas for digital transformation "from the bottom up". In addition, they also set up a ringfenced budget for technology development (ringfenced budgets) to ensure that these engineers and scientists have a clear understanding of the resources they can get from the outset .
At the same time, in order to control quality, Petronas also established the "Petronas Technology Management System" to determine the development method of the project. According to the "Technology Readiness Level system", they will evaluate all projects to measure the technical maturity of . "This is one of our ways to reduce risks, and we want to be NO.1, not a test product," Nasir said. Khoo Choo Beng, general manager of Sarawak Shell Berhad, a subsidiary of Shell Malaysia, expressed a similar view at the meeting of industry and technology executives in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) region (APAC) region (APAC) and technology executives. "We try to avoid digitizing companies for the sake of digitization," Choo Beng said. "Digitalization is a hot word right now, and everyone wants to do their own digital projects in their team, work or space." But Shell Malaysia values quality more than quantity.
He said: "A lot of the time, we want to see if we can deploy cheaper, simpler and faster solutions." The company's focus this year is to "digitize daily affairs", remove many administrative levels of work, and allow employees to focus on more important tasks.
Choo Beng said last year the company proposed a management framework for how to achieve digitalization, which marked the beginning of Shell Malaysia’s digital journey.The company first established a digital and technical advisory board, (Digitalization and Technology Advisory Board), which is responsible for filtering projects suitable for priority development from the project wish list. He said that approval of a project depends on the “value” of the project and the feasibility of completion at a given time and resource.
The committee investigates individuals or teams within the company and understands their pain points, thus finding directions and methods to improve work through digitalization . The company will digitize in five aspects: increasing production, improving security, finding ways to make information within reach, utilizing data as a strategic asset, and simplifying and automating work.
02. Digital talent
Let people accept digital technology is one of the biggest challenges facing the widespread implementation of this technology. On the one hand, employees need to grow rapidly to keep up with rapidly developing digital technologies. On the other hand, many employees are worried that digitalization will affect their daily work and employment. They don't know if they can trust this technology? Adif Zulkifli, executive vice president of
Petronas and CEO of natural gas and new energy , said: The first priority of the new chief digital and information officer is to " spread the concept of digitalization throughout the company", and everything is done to let people understand what digitalization means and what we can do with .
To this end, Petronas has developed a smartphone application for employees called Switch, covering a variety of digital-related topics from a wide range of levels and related to the company’s background. In this app, leaders including Adif used video to explain the advantages of digital technology and emphasized Petronas' digital initiatives. "Leaders lead by example to get all employees more easily," he said. There are also many videos from outside speakers in the app, from Amazon executives to Formula 1 (F1) racers.
At the CERAWeek meeting in Houston in March this year, Tan Sri Wan Zulkiflee, president and CEO of Petronas, said digitalization is penetrating into many of the company's departments, extending to its talent development and succession planning. He said that the company is applying an algorithm to help the vacant positions within the company match the most suitable employees, but this is just the input and matching of the data level, and the final result is still determined by people.
Tan Sri Wan Zulkiflee said: "For companies, we need multiple platforms to train employees, projects to provide practical opportunities for all necessary skills, and we also need a set of procedures to re-certify employees. Only this multi-pronged approach can ensure we have the skills we need in the future." Along this line of thinking, Petronas set up a data science institute that is responsible for certifying data scientists.
ChooBeng said Shell Malaysia has many engineers who have an instinctive love for digital technology and are willing to contribute to this area of the company. The company is internally committed to training employees to improve their digital skills through analytics platforms such as Power BI and SpotFire.
PTTEP has a group of newly hired data scientists and experienced senior engineers in digital technology. “But in Thailand, we still lack the talent to master digital skills, and the competition for digital talent in other industries is extremely fierce,” said Chayong Borizitsawat, group executive vice president, responsible for PTTEP business and corporate transformation.
Currently, the company is looking for relevant talents from other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. PTTEP also established a digital academy within the company to cultivate talents who understand the industry and master digital technology.
03. Leading with business scenarios
Last year, PTTEP launched a digital transformation plan. The company currently has 31 digital projects, using technologies such as data analysis, data visualization, cloud computing and process automation, covering four major aspects: exploration, drilling, development and supply chain.Although the company's digitalization process is still in a very early stage, the company is piloting a predictive maintenance project with an effort to apply advanced analytical methods to optimize gas field development.
The company uses a cloud platform to store, calculate and analyze data from its exploration and production processes, but in many ways still has to rely on suppliers’ standard software. Chayong Borisuitsawat hopes that such software platforms can be open source or open standards so that PTTEP companies can develop their own applications based on them. Adif Zulkifli, executive vice president and CEO of natural gas and new energy, said that Petronas' upstream business is currently mainly focused on digitizing about 70PB of data including earthquake, geological and oil well data, and keep up with the development of information technology. For example, the company is investing in cognitive capabilities in underground and well site development planning. "We have worked with advanced cloud computing and analytics companies in this regard and are seeking to build long-term partnerships to create together between the oil and gas and technology industries and promote knowledge exchange," he said. "Their goal is to make data more accessible and more valuable while improving employee productivity. For example, the alpha well advisor tool developed by the company can collect hundreds of completion reports through mobile devices and structure the data . This way, when an engineer prepares a completion report, he can easily discover some important features, trends and possible challenges from the previously collected well conditions.
Nasir said Petronas also uses robotics and automation technologies to deal with hazardous substances such as mercury, hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, which can also be used in oil fields. In the company's high-pressure/high-temperature labs, robotics and automation technologies have reduced their workforce by 40-50%.
"In the past, relying on our existing manpower, there were many things we could not accomplish, but this technology took a different approach for us. It is hard to believe that we did not lay off any employee. When measuring per capita efficiency, we found that we could do more with the same number of people. For example, before we did not develop software prototypes ourselves but outsourced to other companies. Now people who have been enriched due to the efficiency improvement can develop prototypes, which saves time and reduces costs."
When the project is outsourced, the manufacturer produces the prototype and sends it back to Petronas for testing, and the time spent on the bidding matters lasts about a year. "If a project fails, all the processes have to be done all over again. This failure is frightening, and it can cause the company to become bloated on the project," he said. Shell Malaysia's digital focus is on "making processes more and more efficient" to improve front-line productivity. In the underground section, Shell Malaysia uses a tool called "fault crawler", which can study underground data through artificial intelligence technology and build models to predict the location of faults, so as to make better decisions when designing the well structure.
Due to the limited ability of certain equipment to process gas during oil production, Shell Malaysia has established a real-time optimization tool to control the oil/oil ratio (GOR) of the well. Previously, oil production engineers had to manually check GOR every day, and necessary measures were required if the GOR in the well was raised, but now the tool can do this automatically in real time.
Shell Malaysia also developed a smartphone and tablet application called Prontoforms. Since it can easily submit accident reports , the company's report submissions tripled compared with the previous one. ChooBeng said that in the past it took hundreds of hours a week to analyze reports, Prontoforms now allows workers to enter reports at any time and digitize the submitted content. Next step, Shell Malaysia will optimize the program and use machine learning to automatically search millions of words to better understand the security status of the system.
Shell Malaysia also applies ProntoForms in its inspection reports.In the past, marine inspectors had to take notes, take photos, and then go back to the office to prepare a report, which could take weeks from the start to the completion of the report. With this app, all this work can be done online immediately.
Petronas has published several papers on digitalization theme since its full launch of its digitalization strategy in 2017, sharing its experiences and lessons in the application of the technology. For example, how to become a data-driven company, deploy virtual workstations (VWs) to improve the performance of petroleum engineering technology software (i.e. Petrel platform), thereby reducing IT infrastructure construction expenses by about $280,000.
Petronas has also established Petronas Remote Monitoring and Prediction Diagnostics Center to monitor, analyze, and provide solutions to its factories. Failure prediction models and guiding analysis helped improve asset performance, creating more than $20 million in just four months, while the actual cost was less than $1 million.
