François Thiébaud, DORIS Group
Digitalization is a continuous improvement process that started many years ago. For oil and gas engineering companies, it encompasses a multitude of changes in daily processes; these changes are being enacted at an ever-increasing pace as digital technology provides new tools to create smarter products.
In DORIS’ case, digitalizing processes leads to reductions in operating costs, with knock-on benefits in terms of engineering rates and engineering capex. It involves global communications between the company’s regional offices, easier sharing of resources (tools and personnel), and of expertise to provide an improved service. These changes lead to a synergy and convergence in work processes between the company’s business units to assist inter-group collaboration.
It also means implementing live dashboards with smarter use of data for predictive outlooks to improve decisions on projects and management. Furthermore, digitalization of engineering allows engineers to concentrate on creative design matters.
Another benefit is better-quality engineering services. For instance, 3D modeling now involves creating a digital twin of the fields beginning at the front-end engineering design stage, establishing the foundation for a life of field tracking of the assets. DORIS is working on the integration of subsea facilities into the surface facility model to produce a single field model that can be shared with clients from any location around the world. And through use of augmented reality and virtual reality tools, the company can assist field operators with training and operations.
Tomorrow’s design tool will allow a walk-through the facilities, via wearing of digital goggles; these facilities could be greenfield at design stage or brownfield facilities that have been laser-scanned and imported into 3D models. The integration of time into the digital twin allows monitoring of the project schedule from the early stage of the field development all the way to the operation, leading to time and cost benefits.
DORIS’ STAT Marine business unit has developed an operational database platform which records maintenance and inspection data of equipment during the entire field life and provides a clear and real-time view of the equipment status. In the future, cloud-based digital twins will integrate all equipment items and their entire life history, from the drawing board (screen) to the operation phase, with quick remote access in the field via tablets using data mining algorithms. •
