Curiosity, creativity and collaboration – creating a digitally integrated supply chain

Abstract

With the need to extend the life of ageing assets, manage shorter maintenance campaigns and ensure availability of resources, companies are becoming more curious and creative about possible solutions and more willing to collaborate across traditional silos. Oil and gas companies are building more digitally integrated supply chains and are seeing significant results.

When a damaged gasket can cost US$1M/day and create a major safety hazard, even early stage implementation of digital technologies can generate significant improvements. A liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant was curious about what they could achieve through better data integration and alignment. Visualising activity plans and digitally integrating equipment strategies through bill of materials improved the plant’s supply responsiveness, increasing both asset availability and production output by 2%.

Creatively leveraging automation across the supply chain is helping companies become more connected. Starting with advanced analytics, the building blocks for end-to-end solutions are being built. In the near future, predictive part failures data will automatically load into work management processes, maintenance plans will immediately update and the right parts automatically ordered at the right time. Some companies are experimenting with this ‘virtual handshake’ across departments and systems, creating a smarter, faster and more reliable operation. Using both analytics and improved collaboration, one LNG operation has seen a 40% reduction in duplicate parts, a 30% reduction in inventory and an 8% reduction in overall maintenance cost.

Through curiosity, creativity and collaboration across a digitally integrated supply chain, industry organisations can reduce controllable operational cost, making them more reliable and competitive.