Challenges Oil and Gas OEMs Face with Digital Transformation and How IIoT Helps

The oil and gas industry’s competition with alternate, green energy sources, and calls for more accountability from the public have led to the industry embracing digital transformation technologies to spur growth and innovation. According to Quantzig, leading oil and gas OEMs are looking to digital technology like IIoT to improve decision-making processes, and to tap new revenue streams to improve profitability.

The digital transformation of the oil and gas industry starts with the ability to capture data in order to understand complex processes. Therefore, the data produced from deployed equipment on extraction fields and in manufacturing facilities must be able to be captured and processed. The responsibility of enabling the capture of oil and gas-related data falls on the shoulders of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who produce the equipment the industry uses. This means OEMs must develop innovative equipment and solutions to provide the sectors with the digital transformative tools it needs to optimize its operations.

Oil and gas OEMs inherit both the challenges of the wider industry, as well as specific manufacturing challenges. These challenges include the need to meet government regulations with regards to factory floor safety and emission rates. Also, to produce the innovative equipment that will power these digital transformation strategies, oil and gas OEMs have to understand how end-users interact with produced equipment. Today, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) offers two powerful solutions the industry can leverage to solve its challenges.

How IIoT Supports the Implementation of Digital Transformation Strategies for Oil and Gas OEMs

The first solution IIoT offers is its hardware. IIoT hardware refers to smart devices, sensors, and other data-capturing technology that can be deployed in remote locations while staying connected to other devices and a central computing platform. The second powerful solution is the central computing platform—or an IIoT platform—which offers the oil and gas industry access to unlimited storage space and resources so that data can be analyzed data and business insight received.

Oil and gas OEMs can leverage IIoT solutions in diverse ways and in many cases OEMs can choose to customize these solutions to fit their unique problems. That being said, some of the most important ways IIoT supports digital transformation technologies and eases the challenges of Oil and Gas OEMs include:

• Remotely Monitoring On-field Equipment – Creating innovative equipment starts with understanding traditional problems associated with how facilities make use of older equipment. With an IoT platform, oil and gas OEMs can capture the big data sets coming from every machine they have ever sold. This provides the tools for further analysis into their performance on the factory floor. The IIoT data capture and machine monitoring process is not invasive, as equipment with the capacity to transfer data to the Cloud simply sends the data, while legacy equipment can be plugged into IIoT hardware to capture data. Analyzing the performance-related data provides the insight needed to innovate and develop optimized equipment for the oil and gas industry.
• An Interconnected Plant Floor – Every digital transformative process endeavors to discover patterns in daily operations to solve complex challenges. Thus, a facility-wide interconnected network of all assets on the factory floor is required. Facilities intending to integrate Industry 4.0 models also have to rely on interconnected cyber-physical systems for their digital transformation and this is where IIoT helps. With IIoT, the diverse assets and operations on the factory floor can be connected to enable data transfer on the device-to-device level and the device-to-cloud stage. An interconnected factory floor can then be leveraged to drive predictive maintenance or throughput optimization strategies.

Taking advantage of IIoT’s ability to simplify digital transformation strategies starts with searching for and choosing best-in-class IIoT hardware and software options. Learn how MachineMetrics supports manufacturers of Oil and Gas equipment.