Digital Twin

Kayd Larsen of Brownfield Solutions Ltd. shares the business value of Hexagon's asset lifecycle information management solutions. "Talk to your personnel that are the front line. Understand their struggles. Understand how much time it takes them to execute a project or a work order from an operations standpoint. Once you understand that a lot of these guys are looking for information and it takes them hours, if not days, to find a single piece of critical information that they require to maintain that facility." Brownfield Solutions focuses on engineered information management and the integration of engineered information into the operations of plants and facilities. Brownfield provides consultation and support services to help owner operators maintain and re-use engineered information throughout the plant lifecycle. *** Digital transformation for the lifecycle is critical to the operating of that facility. We’ve been successful at one of Canada’s largest oil and natural gas operators, and in taking that information from the beginning, from the project phase, and implementing it into operations and maintaining the information, keeping the information up to date, keeping it trusted, so a high level of data integrity, and moving forward with our lifecycle management, which is essentially the maintenance and the things that fall out after we start the operating procedure. I see digitalization as affecting the industry in a huge way. Essentially we’re back to that same concept of access to information. People need to be able to make accurate decisions quickly in the field, from any location. And that’s really where we’re seeing a lot of benefit on the owner-operator side of things. Previously we used to have to take paper, print off our drawings, go out into the field, redline things, mark ‘em up, bring it back into the office, update the tools… And that process just keeps going. So now with digitalization, we can do all of those things, in the field with technology using Hexagon’s products. We have quicker ways to manage our change. And essentially, integrate those changes back in to our database systems. The benefits to the early adopters are, again, access to information. And, really we need to get a handle on the information. So, before we start any digital transformation or digital process, we need access to the information before we can build the trusted information. So an early adopter, you’re looking at connecting the dots, creating those intelligent links, getting that information in one location so that we see it and we can analyze the data in front of us. From there, we can prioritize: which data do we need to focus on first to ensure that the data integrity is there. And as we continue down the process we then get into lifecycle management and management of change. I would say to businesses struggling to see the value of digitalization is really, talk to your personnel that are the front line. Understand their struggles. Understand how much time it takes them to execute a project or a work order from an operations standpoint. Once you understand that a lot of these guys are looking for information and it takes them hours, if not days, to find a single piece of critical information that they require to maintain that facility, that’s going to highlight a whole bunch of issues, and also highlight opportunity, right? That’s where Hexagon and Brownfield can come into play. We can go in and we can show them those opportunities. We can look at ROIs and start to gather that information on essentially being more efficient. Hexagon’s products allow us to get in and look at the data, look at those requirements, identify our priorities and execute with confidence.