Why firms must look to the clouds, APM

TONY TURNER* focuses on the challenges the energy organisations face in the Gulf region, and the key role of new technologies such as effective, digitally centred asset management in helping them to respond to those challenges.

- TONY TURNER

IMAGINE the scenario: A major Middle East oil plant needs an important replacement part (a compressor). Spares are not available locally and the lead time to secure one through the traditional route would be months. Weighing up this – and the potential loss to production that could result without it – what does its infrastructure maintenance team do? ... They charter a 747 to fly to Europe and collect one.

During my 13 years based in the region, helping major energy organisations to more effectively manage and maintain their assets (plants, rigs, wells, pipelines, pumps and so on) and enhance their core work processes with new technologies, I regularly heard this story.

Urban myth or not, it brilliantly encapsulated the challenges that the operations and maintenance teams of major energy infrastructure owner operators across the GCC faced. Components had to be sourced from Europe or America and the lead time, due to a combination of anti-corruption procedures and manual and slow internal processes, could be many months.

The introduction in earnest of the latest enterprise asset management and reliability technologies in the region has helped to make life easier for these organisations – which typically have hundreds of thousands of maintainable and interrelated assets under their stewardship.

The struggles being experienced by Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) when it called on the services of my team and I (at the firm I worked previously) were typical. It had 31 different systems in place to execute turnaround and maintenance work at three locations.