How has BMT been adapting to this changing landscape? “We understand sensors and we understand data. We have always seen ourselves as a data delivery company, identifying early on the need for Digital Transformation to increase margins and keep pace with industry and demographic expectations. “Historically, our sensors and instrumentation systems were mainly used as indicators to support safe operations offshore. “Our helideck monitoring systems, for example, are used to let operators know whether conditions are safe for a helicopter to land on an offshore platform, while the systems we put on risers and mooring lines let operators know whether their assets are stable and safe to use for oil production. “In some cases, regulators have mandated the use of these kinds of sensors and instrumentation systems in order to keep production running and protect the environment. “Over many years, we realised that our real-time systems had collected an immense amount of environmental, metocean and asset structural integrity data.“ In recent years, we’ve seen significant shifts on the client side to leaner operating structures, a push to reduce field development costs through standardisation and a desire to maximise the operating life of current assets. Data is key to achieving these objectives and our customers, who have been collecting asset integrity and operational data for many years, have increasingly been mining and analysing that data to make decisions on everything from supply chain to life extension. Industry expectations have increased in line with the rate and speed of technological change. For example, the need to reduce costs has made manual data cleansing too time-consuming, leading to advances in how this process can be automated. Inevitably, user demographics have also changed, with younger engineers coming into the business expecting data ‘now’, rather than waiting for data scientists to manually analyse it, or for it to be shipped from offshore to onshore, as used to be the case. They expect applications, rather than traditional data hosting sites. More recently, there is a real push towards the idea of data sharing, with industrial giants in all sectors giving free access to datasets and offering to pay for insights where these will improve operational efficiencies. So, it will be interesting to see how these ‘data liberation’ movements progress. Data has always been an important asset across the oil and gas field development life cycle, from initial reserve assessment right through to decommissioning. How Digital Transformation is Changing Our Customers’ Worlds 9 8 Business Unit Manager, Data Services, BMT Dr Soma Maroju leads BMT’s Data Services team, providing customers expertise in Big Data and Cloud- based solutions to deliver insights from large amounts of measured data, either collected offshore, marine, subsea or from numerical simulations. He has a rich body of experience in the analysis of the hydrodynamic aspects of deep-water floating production and drilling offshore platforms. His team provides customers with data services including data management, processing, comprehensive analyses, and insights. He has a masters in Computer Science and PhD in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering.
[email protected] Head of Instrumentation Services, BMT Andy leads a global team of project managers, multi- disciplinary engineers and field service technicians that provide design, engineering, assembly, integration, commissioning and long-term maintenance of surface and subsea integrity monitoring/ advisory systems throughout the Offshore Energy value chain. Andy has a deep working knowledge of sensor technologies, data acquisition and data processing approaches for offshore marine applications and has been influential in developing innovative solutions in response to industry changes over the last 15 years.
[email protected] Andrew Aldrich DR. Soma Maroju BMT has traditionally operated in the upstream production sector, connecting with both major oil company operators and large engineering, procurement and construction companies (EPCs). Data has always been an important asset across the oil and gas field development life cycle, from initial reserve assessment right through to decommissioning. Cont’d