Foundation of Digital industrial business
Client Profle
The leader of clean power and turbine energy is a global powerhouse in contractual service agreements for owners and operations of large industrial gas turbines. Their PGS also provides operation and maintenance agreements for power plants worldwide. PGS is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The headquarters office is also the regional office for all North American Operations. Along with North America locations, its PGS is located globally. These locations serve Latin America, Europe, Africa, India, Asia, and the Middle East.
Business Goals
Taking Industrial into the Digital Age
The leader of clean power and turbine energy rolled out new digital strategies and operations were in full throttle. Their Power & Generation Services (PGS) had just launched a new series of data-driven solutions focused on improving the performance of their aeroderivative gas turbines with the help of the “Industrial Internet¹.” The Industrial Internet was coined for harnessing the power of IoT sensor connectivity and Big Data analytics to enable more robust, real-time operational intelligence. For the corporation at large, the convergence of digital solutions and industrial performance began to take shape across business segments, transforming them into what they refer to as the “Digital Industrial Business².” To effectively enable this vision through the core foundation of theirbusiness, however, they required the IT infrastructure and data warehousing solutions capable of supporting real-time measurement of these services, products, and performance at finer levels of granularity.
To achieve such performance, the leader of clean power and turbine energy had the following objectives:
• Consolidation of all data sources into a central repository, for teams across divisions to access and analyze data quickly and efficiently
• Conduct Turbine Repair Analysis by monitoring component outages & measuring the man-hours spent services each defect
• Facilitate Historical Outage Analytics
• Driving productivity for contractual services
• Helping managers and other business users to isolate problems quickly by providing dynamic and granular views of the data, on their own terms The enterprise’s Power & Generation Services (PGS) used an existing GRID data warehouse (DW) platform that consolidated servicing data of various component repairs, aggregated from multiple legacy systems. This data would be utilized by business users to conduct downstream analytics that measured quality & output of individual turbines. However, with the new digital imperatives, they would have to upgrade and expand their existing data warehouse capabilities. Upon an intitial Technology Assessment, it was clear that their current GRID DW platform would not be up to par in handling the larger data loads and lacked the concurrent processing capabilities needed for its planned production.
With over 20 years of experience in Data Management & Warehousing capabilities, the leader of clean energy and turbine energy chose to partner with Systech as they converted their GRID platform to a new technology stack. Additionally, the solution needed to also introduce a second replication layer for source data extraction and processing – so that data could be stored in both its raw and processed forms.
Systech was the optimal partner when they were crunched with time and needed to ensure the effective conversion of their technology environment, without disrupting their operational workflows. Systech worked with key stakeholders to design and build a robust DW architecture. Systech also implemented Data processing & integration capabilities to streamline their analytics lifecycle. In order to enable easy analytics for all business users,
Systech established and deployed a self-service analytics model, built upon Tableau – democratizing the analytics process so critical information can be delivered to the right person, by the right time.
The Benefts
Technical Advantages
Migration and Integration of all data sources provided access to clean, reliable, and consistent data to its users. Costs associated with redundant or underperforming technologies were eliminated—after the project, only three technologies were needed. Additionally, processes that required IT administration became automated with the emergence of self-service analytics, saving time for both IT teams and management teams working within the data life cycle. Managers no longer uploaded excel files manually to conduct basic repair analysis; instead, they immediately gleaned insight into the performance and state of their turbines, mitigating costs of repair for the long term.
The Business Benefits
Establishing a high-performing data warehouse and self-service analytics model at PGS set the precedent for scalable analytics & operations across multiple divisions and business segments within the company. Other departments began to migrate their data over into the data warehouse (turned data lake) that Systech built in order to glean the performance advantages achieved through this single project. Soon, other divisions undergoing digital transformation were looking to harness their data by leveraging the data lake for their own purposes:
Power Generation Services
• Repair labor cost reduction: estimates at $20 million cumulative savings globally (conservative)
Oil & Gas
• Asset Performance Management: minimize costs, increase reliability, optimize performance for individual pieces of equipment
• Operations Optimization: system-wide improvements across production facilities, LNG plants, offshore vessels or oil fields, increased production, reduced risk
• Enterprise Optimization: connect demand and supply side to optimize portfolio of cash generating assets
Energy Connections/Management
• Performance Optimization: using real-time data from sensor-enabled manufacturing equipment to predict outcomes
• Informing design engineering to enhance product quality and performance, plant efficiency, and timely delivery to customers.
• Operational and supply chain efficiencies through predictive & prescriptive analytics Future Impact As it digitizes segments of its business, so it will depend on the capabilities of its data infrastructure to determine the success of its transformational initiatives. Pairing digital solutions with advanced analytics will give rise to new ideas and significant opportunities at rapid pace. Setting the foundation with Systech will have been a critical step towards realizing their ambitions now and in the future.
Future Impact
As the leader of clean power and turbine energy digitizes segments of its business, so it will depend on the capabilities of its data infrastructure to determine the success of its transformational initiatives. Pairing digital solutions with advanced analytics will give rise to new ideas and significant opportunities at rapid pace. Setting the foundation with Systech will have been a critical step towards realizing their ambitions now and in the future
