Three Steps Power Facilities Must Prioritize to Meet Expectations — Near-term and Long-Term

September 27, 2024

Adam Goldfarb

[This is the first blog in our Power Industry Imperatives series. View future entries in our Resource Center and watch the replay of the recent webinar, “Transforming Projects & Operations for the Energy Transition.”]

Evolve faster.

Extend the life of current assets.

Drive harder on energy decentralization and the transition to renewables.

Everything digital – now.

These are some of the many demands on facility owners and EPCs who face unprecedented market pressure to balance near-term imperatives with the long-term planning required to create the energy landscape of the future. The challenges are daunting. And ‘no’ is not an option – for customers and external stakeholders as well as management striving to adhere to strategic goals and ESG requirements.

Hexagon energy and power experts believe the linchpin to success is digital transformation (DT). But it’s no secret: digitally transforming a power facility — much less the entire industry — is no easy feat.

The digital transformation struggle is real – but genuine change is achievable

As Harvard Business Review reports, “Seventy percent (70%) of all DT initiatives do not reach their goals.”

On the other hand, that means 30% of initiatives are successful! Why? And what can the rest of the industry learn from these early adopters and innovators?

In Hexagon’s experience working with facility owners, EPCs and various energy stakeholders across the globe, successful transformation initiatives focus on hiring and developing tech-savvy executives and talent. They bring together all of the organization’s data, breaking down the siloes that plague virtually every legacy environment. And they invest in AI, data quality, and software.

What’s more, they prioritize three key digital initiatives to drive safe, reliable and efficient operations.

Step 1: Visibility

Improving technology integration increases visibility into day-to-day operations, providing benefits for both existing and new power facilities. Increased visibility boosts productivity, drives efficiencies, increases performance, enables proactive maintenance, mitigates risk, and accelerates progress.

The Siloed Data Problem

When it comes to the energy sector, there is a pervasive — and pernicious — roadblock preventing energy providers from capitalizing on the mountains of useful data they have captured over the years. While most legacy plants have been using software and other tools to collect data for decades, all of that data is usually siloed in the department where it was originally collected.

While ongoing improvements have been made to various software solutions over time, the software used to plan, design, and execute the building of a plant generally doesn’t speak or interact with the software used to operate, maintain, and secure the plant after handover.

Any corporate data set that cannot share insights with other applications is a silo and missed opportunity. Every standalone application and database represents a silo.

Making all of your corporate data available by breaking information silos delivers four key benefits:

Risk Reduction and Enhanced Safety: Access to reliable data from all operations facilitates the identification and mitigation of safety risks, ensuring the well-being of employees.
Enhanced Efficiency: Easy access to information and its validation accelerates decision-making, improving accuracy. Access to accurate, unified data enhances operations throughout the organization.
Increased Transparency: Promotes transparency across the organization, enabling stakeholders to make fully informed operational and strategic decisions.
Enhanced Analytics: Integrating plant asset data into analytics systems to deliver valuable context to generate deeper, more relevant insights. This understanding improves performance assessment and identifies opportunities for enhancement.

How do you get there? Invest in automation technology to streamline the collection of data, along with data intelligence software to interpret findings and disperse insights out of silos and into the hands of stakeholders in all departments. This investment will help achieve the greater visibility EPCs, owner/operators and facility managers need, while making it easier to balance short- and long-term goals.

Step 2: Standardization

Given the volatile nature of the industry, it’s important to revisit portfolio strategies frequently — but with a critical focus on standardizing the decision-making to remove any biases that could lead to poor capital planning and performance.

Aggregating and visualizing data in a cohesive and integrated way (Step 1) informs decision-making by creating a single source of truth. Instead of stakeholders making recommendations or pitching pet projects based on their siloed data and viewpoints, everyone operates with the same set of data and a common understanding. This means decisions can be made in a much more rapid and methodical fashion.

Standardization de-risks decision-making and aligns stakeholders. Numbers do the talking instead of opinions, so pet projects don’t get pushed ahead of projects that are more critical to the short- and long-term success of the organization.

How do you get there? Using digital tools and automation to harness the power of data provides stakeholders with consistent and unbiased criteria for setting clear, measurable goals, and the ability to evaluate projects based on their potential impact and ROI. This enables stakeholders to remove organizational subjectivity and make better-informed decisions that drive near-term performance and better predictability into long-term performance.

Step 3: Optimization

While greater visibility and standardization can help provide a greater balance between short- and long-term goals, and fuel insights to boost an organization’s competitive edge, digital initiatives shouldn’t stop there. Optimization of the portfolio’s operational and fiscal capabilities is the logical next step. This is where advanced software, applied technologies, and autonomous solutions (think AI, sensors, machine learning, digital twins, etc.) come into play.

Ongoing digital transformation drives optimization, which enables plants to improve operational excellence, mitigate risk, become more resilient, and increase the ability to meet new goals over time. As optimization evolves, enhanced technology delivers accurate, trusted data and strategic insights to drive better decision-making and ensure policy compliance. Over time, autonomous systems can learn how to complete tasks without human intervention, improving efficiencies and keeping employees out of harm’s way.

Optimization provides stakeholders access to vital information, when and where they need it. For example, field technicians have real-time access to work orders and inventory management insights, while engineers can pull up original blueprints at a moment’s notice. Finally, executives have up-to-date investment planning insights at their fingertips, so they can make the right investments in the right assets at the right time.

How do you get there? Ultimately, optimization enables organizations to strive toward what Hexagon calls a Smart Digital Reality — a world that goes beyond digital twins, where all data is connected via a digital backbone and available in real time. Achieving your Smart Digital Reality will take time, as well as investments in the technology needed to establish visibility, standardization, and a digital backbone to tie it all together. Over time, these steps will help ensure your portfolio is optimized to enable continuous measurement, analysis, and improvement, while maximizing each asset’s performance and overall life.

Keep an eye on the prize: What the power plant of the future looks like

The power plant of the future, designed to meet ambitious expectations, must be built with aggressive plans for achieving the following digital goals:

Continuous information flow, where insight from design and engineering plans are easily integrated into the physical plant, and day-to-day insights are seamlessly exchanged between management and employees in the field.

Constant telemetry, so operators know how every component in the facility is performing in real time.

Accurate forecasting, so operators understand what steps to take to maintain that performance and plan for the future.

Proactivity, where up-to-date information fuels the decision-making process regarding operational, fiscal, and sustainability initiatives.

From a technology perspective, achieving these aspirational goals requires the deployment of a real-time, “always up-to-date” Smart Digital Reality, fed by a digital backbone that contextually integrates and interprets data from all stakeholders, departments and vendors.

Getting digital transformation right is critical in the evolving energy industry. Are you ready to help your organization lead the way?

At Hexagon’s Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division, we provide software, digital tools, and autonomous solutions that help EPCs and asset owners leverage data throughout the asset lifecycle. If you’d like to learn how to accelerate your journey toward visibility, standardization, and optimization, we’re ready to meet you where you’re at. Contact us today. Or…