Publications

Digital transformation is at the top of the agenda for all executives across all industries and is considered a prerequisite to drive step changes in efficiency and ensure the survival of companies. This imperative also applies to the process industries; digital transformation in projects is being driven by lower CAPEX expenditure and the need to deliver projects on schedule and to budget. In capital intensive industries, 98 percent of mega-projects incur cost overruns or delays, with average cost increases of 80 percent over budget and average slippage of 20 months from the original schedule1. The adoption of digital technologies can lower the costs and risks for construction and commissioning, eliminate many of the costs and delays with final deliverables. In oil and gas, future projects could have 50% less CAPEX and 30% less OPEX due to unmanned platforms, remote operations centers, and automated data collection lowering headcount2. Additionally, these strategic investments can ultimately become profit centers beyond the traditional ROI paradigm, resulting in a greater return to shareholders/stakeholders for our customer organizations. The digital transformation of projects is nothing new to Hexagon PPM and our customers. For over 40 years, we have provided data-centric design tools, rule-based design verification, and management of the end-to-end flow of data between tools. Solutions have been introduced to manage design, procurement, materials, construction, completions and portfolio, and project and contract performance. The concept of providing a central, standards-based, consolidated repository for data and documents with workflow to manage project change, technical queries, and other work processes is now well established. Together, these technologies provide a continual chain or digital thread through the project from initiation to final handover, incrementally building a virtual representation or digital twin of a facility (Figure 1). These innovations ensure that the correct information can be provided to end users in context of the work being undertaken to support making better decisions earlier and to avoid project delays and unnecessary additional costs. What is new is the maturing and convergence of key digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, big data, etc., that have already been successfully applied in other industries such as finance, automotive, and aerospace. Now these can be applied in the digital transformation of the process industries. One initiative is the application of AI to automated resource planning/re-planning to fully optimize construction sequences daily. By analyzing millions of construction scenarios, there is potential to reduce construction costs by approximately 10 percent. Another example is the optimized, automated, 3D pipe routing with an AI system. This will replace rote 3D routing work after the logical connections (P&ID) and layout are defined. The benefits of this approach include project schedule acceleration through faster creation of the bill of materials for procurement and faster creation of detail drawings needed for construction work packages, more accurate bids and estimates, reduced 3D modelling effort, and quality assurance costs.