Commentary: Offshore fabricators should embrace their digital future

By Lisa De Vellis, MODS Management 

Fabricators are often the unsung heroes of offshore oil and gas projects. Construction execution would “drown” without the complex yet quality-assured components of subsea infrastructure such as valves, flanges, and other fittings and manufactured systems. 

Yet, if they continue to be among the last holdouts of an analog world, oil and gas component and equipment fabricators risk “being left out to sea.”

Paper-based dossiers, Excel-run progress tracking, siloed knowledge and manual handoffs still dominate operations for many fabrication service providers. These inefficiencies trickle down, compromising offshore construction execution. In an age when productivity gains are increasingly achieved through digitalization with fit-for-purpose software tools, this stubborn inertia is costing fabricators more than time.

Offshore oil and gas projects stand to benefit immensely from streamlined fabrication oversight and accessible, reliable fabrication progress updates. The onus here is on fabricators to minimize this friction, creating a path of least resistance that “unclogs the pipes,” enabling project execution to flow in more a more productive manner. This is much the same logic as for offshore brownfield projects: digital fabrication oversight reduces administrative burdens, increases productivity, and facilitates fact-based communication.

To usher this part of the offshore project value-and-supply chain into the future, fabricators – much like oil and gas project management – need to embark upon a digital path.

Lean manufacturing principles

Oil and gas component fabricators have long defined themselves by an ability to build—to weld, to bolt, to assemble—complex units for technically challenging contexts. But today’s real competitive edge lies not in what you build, but in how you think about building. Lean manufacturing has reshaped how the world’s most efficient factories operate – it’s a philosophy that has translated over to the construction sector, holding the potential to wildly improve productivity in an environment known for an excess of non-value added activities.

Lean principles—eliminating waste, standardizing processes, enabling continuous improvement—are as applicable to a pipe spool as they are to a car. Oil and gas equipment fabricators should be thinking more like precision manufacturers, not reactive builders. In manufacturing, output is king. Throughput, consistency, and quality control all drive value. When fabricators act more like “lean” manufacturers, they’re not just making “things” for the oil and gas market; they’re refining processes and workflows that make offshore projects better: reducing material, time and other resource waste.

To be “lean” in industrial fabrication is to eliminate non-value-added activities from design to delivery. And it’s not just about process improvement for a better return on investment. It’s about survival. Why? Because the market is shifting.

Emerging fabrication alternatives

Emerging alternatives to steel and to fabrication processes—from engineered composites, low-carbon innovations, modular design and even robot-led assembly—are beginning to penetrate corners of the energy market. This isn’t just an emerging competitive pressure for oil and gas equipment fabricators. It should serve as a wake-up call. Digitalization is not about going paperless for its own sake. It’s about gaining control, heightening efficiencies, and adapting to the future.

Manual actions introduce friction—errors, delays, and miscommunications. Digitalization supplants this room for error: streamlining process oversight, removing unnecessary complexity and harnessing control. Imagine a fabrication workflow where every weld trace, material certification and inspection record are natively digital, searchable and sharable. Where estimators no longer spend days wrangling spreadsheets, and dossiers are generated with the click of a button. In this world, fabricators preserve all information as historical data archives and clients receive reliable, expeditious fabrication data as part of the service.

Digitalizing oil and gas fabrication isn’t some abstract vision of the future. It’s just good practice. And the tools already exist. The benefits of digitalization will manifest towards constraint-free offshore project execution. And this is precisely how digitalization aligns with “lean” thinking: by systematically removing waste to improve productivity; towards continuous improvement and realization of better outcomes.

Sustainability and efficiency

We can’t talk about modernization of any industry or process without also giving at least a nod to sustainability. Digitalization enhances fabrication sustainability in two ways. First, it does this by directly reducing waste embedded in fabrication (over-ordering, excess transport, scrap materials), which directly impacts embodied carbon in materials. Second, it does this by enabling the kind of data transparency that empowers smarter decisions enabling continuous improvement and a competitive edge.

The oil and gas industry – and the companies that sustain it – ought to be increasingly incentivized (whether by regulatory or business pressures) to monitor the environmental impact of offshore assets. This includes conducting the likes of material lifecycle assessments and embodied carbon calculations analytics for continuous improvement, which require data. And data require digital infrastructure, starting with fabrication.

If the oil and gas industry wants to compete in a future shaped by sustainability mandates, circular economies and carbon transparency, their fabricators can no longer afford to operate like analog islands. They must integrate and evolve to suit the demands and pressures of offshore owner-operators, governments and society at large.

A cultural shift

Adopting digital tools is not just a technological upgrade. It’s a cultural one. Fabricators pride themselves on craft, and rightfully so. But craft should not be confused with tradition. The best craftspeople are always improving process and tools. Digitalization offers fabrication teams and offshore project teams more control, not less. It helps everyone forecast risks before they metastasize. It’s not about removing the human from the loop. It’s about empowering that human with better information.

Oil and gas equipment fabricators stand at a crossroads. Down one path: a slow erosion of margins, as material innovation and digitally-native competitors gain ground. Down the other: a reinvention of practice, rooted in frictionless lean thinking and enabled by digital capability.