This spring, Joe Perino presented the webinar “Digital Transformation in Asset Intensive Industries: Risks, Rewards & Revenue” along with Jim Stuart of Lloyd’s Register. (Click that link to get the webinar on demand.) Here the research analyst with LNS Research previewed his presentation. Take a look…
Smart Industry: What is unique about digital transformation among asset-intensive industries?
Joe: Asset-intensive industries have some characteristics that differ from other industries:
- Scale and life of investments: massive capital investment (often in the billions per asset) expected to be productive and last for many years …20, 30, even 50 years, for example, with refineries and power plants.
- Risk profiles. In many of these industries, when things go wrong (fire, explosion, spills/leaks, etc.) the effects can be devastating to plant, property and people, plus the environment and surrounding community. These industries are conservative and risk-averse by nature.
- These large assets, many of which are linear in nature, strive for very high utilization of their capacities (it's generally their lowest per-unit cost point, too). Reliability is critical. Thus there is significant opportunity to improve both asset and process reliability.
- In addition, due to the nature of their risk profiles, EHS and quality are integral to operational excellence and sustainability.
- Aligning people, process and technology is particularly challenging. They are slow to change and most of these areas operate in their own silos.
Smart Industry: What's a common misconception about the relationship between risk and asset performance?
Joe: Perhaps there are a couple: first that even the non-critical assets to plant operation do not have significant risk. And second, as mentioned above, each area looks at its respective risks (e.g., mechanical integrity, structural integrity, process integrity, etc.), rather than holistically across the entire operation.
