Power & Utilities

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

Aligning internal teams to drive more efficient, sustainable power facilities is vital for long-term profitability and success. But owner operators, EPCs and their employees often struggle to get on the same page as they actively pursue project and operational excellence. 

The complexity of operating and maintaining power generating stations and the electric grid can be overwhelming with the amount of data collected. From capital planning and design to engineering and operations, technology is now embedded in every aspect of today’s power facilities. There’s just one problem: data often remains siloed, hampering communication, decision making and profits.

As the industry moves toward smarter power plants and grids, bringing data together from disparate technologies and digital twins into a single source of truth will be critical to ensuring stakeholders can effectively collaborate, align and drive efficiencies.

Siloed data needs to be integrated and easily accessible for all stakeholders – but how?

A typical power plant or a power grid today employs dozens of software platforms to perform a variety of tasks. Operators use tools to monitor and analyze operations across the facility. Plant managers use a plethora of tools for engineering, long-term planning, maintenance, inventory management, and more. Additionally, at the fleet level, managers are looking at data across the portfolio to drive operational excellence and improve performance. On top of all these internal stakeholders, EPCs and contractors have their own digital tools for design and project management.

Many power plants and grid managers have multiple digital twins across several business areas adding to the complexity of data living in too many places.

At Hexagon, we help power providers connect these digital twins and disparate pieces of data together through a digital backbone – the engine for interoperability that connects data across the entire industrial asset lifecycle. The digital backbone powers what Hexagon refers to as your Smart Digital Reality, a unified, role-based, real-time view of the physical and digital realities across your project and asset portfolio. This provides stakeholders with visibility into every aspect of an operation through a shared lens, enabling improved collaboration and smarter decision-making – tearing down those siloes into one single source of truth across the enterprise. 

Technology integration is challenging. Where do you start?  

Since technology integration typically works best when it’s rolled out in stages, the best way to get the ball rolling is to perform an analysis to identify the critical areas to focus on first. For many organizations, three key critical areas of concern include:  

1) Safety. 

Safety is a non-negotiable in any industrial environment. The power plants with the best safety records have a culture that prioritizes safety. Creating a safety culture requires the ability to freely see and discuss “close calls” or “good catches” alongside recordable safety events. Creating a single source of truth around safety can help maintain high safety standards. Instead of safety coaching by site or even crew, tools that unify safety procedures and best practices across all employees help ensure dynamic and responsive information sharing to drive improved safety performance.

For example, consider a facility executing a generator hydrogen degassing procedure. Based on who is managing the procedure you could have multiple supervisors who have three very different degassing procedures in hand. Whether it is an employee who has been onsite for 20 years, a new supervisor from another facility, or a contractor, the procedures used can vary based on previous experience. Inconsistencies in procedures may increase safety incidents.

However, creating a centralized asset maintenance solution can ensure that teams work collaboratively to create a single procedure, digitize the process and integrate it into a shared enterprise asset management (EAM) system that workers can tap into, help ensure critical steps aren’t missed, while making employees accountable. In addition, updates to best practices and procedures are readily available to responsible parties. 

2) Reliability. 

Plant and grid operators experiencing failures require the need to perform a root cause analysis on the most persistent issues in the plant for the critical assets. In addition, procedures need to be clearly established and digitized to ensure issues are detected early. 

Digital tools and automation can streamline the process, making it easier to predict and report failures, log maintenance and repairs, and track expenses. Funneling data through a digital backbone into a “single pane of glass” provides stakeholders with the insight needed to take action promptly and monitor incident resolution status.  

3) Cost. 

The EAM system is at the core of the power plant – it tracks labor, parts, failures, how those failures are addressed, and more. A common issue is that data pertaining to expenses isn’t handled consistently. It isn’t entered according to standard parameters, and all too frequently, costs are applied to the wrong task or not recorded at all.

Cost and reliability go hand-in-hand. When plant employees don’t have a single source of truth, it’s difficult to collaborate and get an accurate picture of maintenance needs and ensure proper staffing. Time is wasted tracking down information such as job orders or material location, leading to maintenance workers wait idly for parts to be staged for a repair.

Time wasted = money wasted. But when all stakeholders have visibility through a single source of truth and best practices and processes are digitized to ensure proper steps are taken, power operators can save time, reduce downtime between maintenance tasks, and ensure costs are properly allocated. 

Leadership needs to be on board and set cultural standards and expectations  

For organizations that want to make the transition to a Smart Digital Reality, leadership has to drive a culture of accountability and standard work across the enterprise. That often means standing firm and creating a total transformation to digital tools and turning away from old, inefficient habits. 

It’s equally critical for leadership to be transparent, and to use supporting data, when addressing employee questions around change initiatives. The power industry is filled with technical people who love complexity and the ability to solve problems. For those technical people, data is a powerful tool that can tell a powerful story – a story that informs business decisions that improve outcomes measurably.

For example, Hexagon industry consultant Jenny Bulach, previously a generation station plant manager at a Fortune 150 power company, had to enforce a new safety policy requiring vehicle drivers back into their parking spots with the assistance of spotters.  Like any big change, she encountered resistance even involving a seemingly small practice. Only when Bulach discussed the number of accidents the industry had experienced at other facilities and the impacts on safety and cost, did employees start to understand the importance of the change.

It is a small example but shows that when operators gain visibility into data that supports the changes being made, say a reduction in safety incidents to near zero or time savings equivalent to 20 percent, it’s easier to rally employees around new policies. Inviting employees to collaborate and help develop new processes also goes a long way compared to forcing changes down their throats. 

Technology integration can be hard.
Hexagon has the tools and expertise to streamline the process. 

Striving toward your Smart Digital Reality provides a great opportunity to improve efficiencies throughout the asset lifecycle. Not only can shared visibility drive collaboration and speed up decision making, improved data accuracy can also help stakeholders make impactful decisions to improve safety, reliability and long-term profitability.  

If you would like to learn what it will take for your organization to transition to your Smart Digital Reality, we’d love to talk with you. Contact us today.  Or… 

Catch the replay of our recent webinar,  
“Transforming Projects & Operations for the Energy Transition”  
WATCH NOW!!