Operations within offshore oil and gas LNG industry are super complex. Located on the middle of ocean, making the operations dangerous due to the seawave, weather (heavy storm, strong winds) and water pressure on the subsea facilities like CCS & SURF.

Apart from the geographical challenges, LNG upstream process is one of the most challenging engineering process, involving end to end natural gas processing from deep seafloor all the way up to the FPSO and OLNG facilities.

Complex operations is equal to complex asset management especially for a facilities with high safety and environmental risk. a sets of digital solution must be rolled out to help ensuring the good asset integrity which generally measured by lower MTTR(mean time to resolution) and MTBF(mean time between failure ) matrix.

There are at least four main pilar to maintain and improve asset integrity on oil and gas facilities such as EAM, CMMS, Industrial Data Platform, MOC (management of change) and RBI (risk based inspection).

These digital pillar will be operated based on the organization maintenance strategy. Most recent battle proven maintenance strategy framework is RCM (reliability centered maintenance) where the maintenance strategy is defined based on the equipment or functional system risk.

Five Digital Pillar of Maintenance Operations

Each of the pillar has critical role to ensure correct maintenance strategy and smooth maintenance operations.

EAM & CMMS as sub module of EAM

Traditional CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) won’t fit for oil and gas LNG requirement due to the facilities complexity & strict HSSE regulatory.

However, the core CMMS features such as work order tracking, asset hierarchy, preventive maintenance, maintenance task list or jobplan and sparepart inventory management are still essential and available as sub module of EAM (enterprise asset management).

These CMMS feature can be further integrated with asset life cycle management of EAM to maintain the end to end of asset lifecycle from commisioning all the way up to the decommisioning to improve the asset integrity.

APM (Asset performance management)

In contrast with CMMS and EAM where they more focused on shaping the day to day maintenance related activity operations planning and scheduling, APM or also known as asset performance management is used to monitor the asset health.

Any performance degradation or potential issue from HSSE or production perspective can be captured by APM and distributed to the operator and maintenance team through various channel including dashboard and personal notification (email, telegram and so on)

Data Platform

Advancement of operation and information technology played major role on oil and gas facilities asset integrity quality from DCS, SCADA, CMMS, EAM, APM and now GenAI(generative artificial intelligence) is emerging into asset integrity practices which deepen the machine assisted asset related analysis quality.

GenAI can be feed with numerous of asset related data (structured and non structured) and return the various analysis ranging from health, safety and performance.

— However, traditional ML model might still need to be keep for number based prediction such as predictive maintenance, perfromance degradation

GenAI / LLM based analytics is the complementary of tradtional numeric machine learning which can’t process non-numeric data.

Analytics capabilities for asset integrity usually reside on APM (asset performance monitoring) software and nowdays can also be found on industrial data platform.

MOC (Management of Change)

Any change request which will affect oil and gas LNG facilities asset integrity must be properly evaluated regardless the request origin, for example from corrective maintenance RCA(root cause analysis), perfromance degradation analysis, asset remaining life analysis, post instrumental/visual inspection or condition based monitoring.

Competency Management System

All floating structure and facilities must be operated and maintained skilled and certified engineer to minimize and completely avoid HSSE incident or accident.

— right man on right places.

In order to keep the placement requirement aligned with workers skills and certification, a digital tools with specific function to manage training, skills and competency is needed.

Key Players

As a person with IT background, OT(operation technology) digital ecosystem is surprisingly different with IT ecosystem where usually big cloud provider company like microsoft, google, AWS are dominating the market.

However, on the operationg technology segment, these company are not the main player, more like the supporting unit. In other hand, company like hexagon, aveva, honeywell, rockwell, yokogawa and IBM are dominating the operations technology especially software that used on the site/plant-level.

below are the key player which lead the market from each of the maintenance operations digital pillar and often used on oil and gas company.