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Oil prices have dropped below $50/barrel recently, a level not seen since November 2016. The decline in oil prices is likely due to the imbalance between supply and demand, slower than expected progress towards re-balancing and the divergence outlook of the oil trend among stakeholders. As a result, crude prices continue to swing wildly, and the volatility is causing a lot of enterprises to hold back their capital investment, preserving capital in a survival mode.
In today’s volatile environment, refineries and petrochemical plants have to continue optimizing their operations to reduce costs, and improving organizational agility to seize opportunities in the market without incurring additional CAPEX. Digital Operations Management enables refineries and petrochemical plants to unlock tremendous value from their operations and assets, helping them to sustain their operations in the new ‘normal’ era of low oil prices.
Digital Operations Management is not only about Technology
Digital Operations Management is not only about technology. It requires a holistic approach to transform operations; implementing changes to the existing business and operations models and training employees to effectively operate with new tools – Empowering the workforce to leverage technology for greater efficiency. It requires embarking on a journey of digital transformation, through the elimination of wasted work, automation of work flows and digital “transformation” – changing when, where, which and how work is performed and evolved. An effective Digital Operations Management platform has helped companies to unlock additional millions of dollars in value from optimizing operations through enabling technology.
Management with Digital Operations Management Solution
5 core functions of Digital Operations Management
- Data integration– Unify different data from disparate sources to a single platform, breaking down information silos and improving operational intelligence
- Integrated performance monitoring – Access KPIs, operating thresholds, case management and operations history on a single domain, enabling operations/asset benchmarking to gain operational excellence
- Decision Support tools – Capture critical operational knowledge and provide a linkage between performance events, root cause and actions, reducing mean time to resolution.
- Market leading analytics applications – Optimize the entire value chain through advanced analytics turning data into actionable insight.
- Automated Workflow – Streamline processes and workflows, enabling enterprises to manage their routine processes consistently and efficiently.
Investing efforts and resources in digitalizing Operations Management at your plant can generate huge ROI through improved efficiency, yield and asset availability, sustaining business performance in the new era of heightened competition.
So Where can You Benefit from Digital Operations Management?
Digital Operations Management framework allows you to get started quickly at a functional area to meet your immediate needs before progressively expands the coverage to your entire operations:
Digital Operations Management Implementation
- Maintenance Management optimizes maintenance schedule through enabling early identification of potential asset failures, synchronizing maintenance works with operations schedule. This reduces unplanned shutdowns, increases yield, reduces hydrogen and steam consumption, and increases throughput.
- Operations Management reconciles data and real-time optimization of set points, ensuring optimal process conditions for operations. This reduces operating costs and improves operations margin.
- Energy Management improves energy efficiency with automated and frequent calculations of real equipment efficiency with forecasts and notifications.
- Supply Chain Management integrates refinery operations into scheduling and planning of supply chain, enabling companies to optimize profitability through process simulation.
- Off-sites Management minimizes giveaway and optimizes the cost of blending through identifying operating constraints and making adjustments to optimize blending.
Benefits of implementing Digital Operations Management
Major refiners and petrochemical plants have already embarked on the digital transformation journey, and have since reaped significant benefits from reduced operating costs and improved asset utilization. They are now able to make better and more informed decisions through improved plant-wide operational visibility, and improve ROI through better asset utilization, enabling them to achieve the next level of operational efficiency – up to 5% improvement to incremental revenue and 10% in cost reductions are achievable.
Are you ready to enable Digital Operations Management in your enterprise to gain higher profits? Watch our Webcast
Stan Devries and Wenting Zhu outlined the importance of Digital Operations Management in the O&G industry. They explained how using Digital Operations Management effectively improves operations efficiency, maximizing and sustaining production rates, yields, energy efficiency, and asset availability. Watch the webcast to start your digital transformation journey today.
