With utilities facing ever-increasing regulation, and mining projects moving from the capital works phase into operations, many companies are also contemplating second phase enterprise content management projects. OpenText’s Robert Gascho, industry strategist, energy, and Lee Gale, SAP
solutions director, Asia Pacific and Japan, discuss the push towards
consolidation with Freya Purnell.
Across the board, asset-intensive industries are facing challenging times. In the energy industry, a key concern is compliance with regulation and managing reputational risk. As mining operations move beyond capital works and construction into the operational phase, against a backdrop of shaky economic sentiment, companies need to become more efficient and productive than ever. And for the utilities market, competition is high and so is the regulatory reporting burden.
Also on the agenda is PAS55 or ISO 55000, the new standard for excellence in asset management.
“It’s going to take a while for that standard to actually filter its way into regulations, but businesses are certainly going to want to be adopting those best practices today,” says Gascho.
To meet these challenges, robust systems are required, and particularly for these industries, where maintenance, operational and safety documentation is critical, enterprise content management (ECM) systems are an important tool.
Locally, many companies have already implemented an ECM system, but usually at the departmental level, so they are very much silo-based but looking to consolidate.
“They might have [systems] in engineering, procurement and legal. But now with PAS 55 and other drivers such as the slowdown of new capital works, it’s about productivity, and how do they get cost and inefficiency out of the system,” Gale says.
Mining companies were also big early investors in this area, and many have since undergone projects to consolidate their systems.
“Some of those have not delivered what they hoped. So we are in the consolidation phase pretty much across the board with customers in Australia. They have done something, they have all learnt from the first phase, what worked and then what didn’t work,” Gale says.
“The quality of that first implementation can really affect what they see as possible for their company. To separate the technology from the implementation as well as the cultural acceptance of that technology has been a challenge.”
Gascho (pictured below) says when considering how to optimise their investments, the greatest value will come from tight integration between ECM and ERP systems.
“The optimisation comes from actually linking information and process together,” he says.
“The pitfall when you are trying to bring those worlds together is what’s historically happened – systems integration versus buying something commercial off the shelf. Our integration is out of the box, so it no longer a challenge of systems integration, it’s actually a challenge of business transformation, and we see that that’s really critical to the savvy CIO of today.”
Another trend in the energy industry is towards forming joint venture partnerships as a way to deliver new projects and new resources faster and more efficiently – however, these new partnerships are sometimes with their own competitors.
“In oil and gas, you might have Woodside and Shell operating together on a multi-billion dollar capital project. It’s not a traditional business model today, so people have to adapt to that change, and what’s required is collaboration across the extended enterprise,” Gascho says. “So you can’t rely on the traditional business mode where your ERP is only for your company and for your back office operations – you have to think about it as a way to strategically bridge those gaps across the entire value chain.”
To help to overcome these issues, an advantage of the Open Text solution, according to Gascho, is that it delivers in-process collaboration.
“You can actually have business workspaces where people from across different business functions or across the value chain can actually collaborate around that process, share information, and actually follow steps of specific processes. It could be a purchase order, or it could be an asset maintenance project,” he says.
One of the areas for the development of the ECM area in the future, is the definition of best practices and solution frameworks for areas such as asset management.
“We are augmenting what’s already in the box for asset management with predictive maintenance or shutdown turnaround excellence – providing other add-ons to that core business that will actually drive a real business transformation and efficiency in those vertical applications,” Gascho says.
Mobility is another developing area, crucial for asset-intensive industries operating in remote locations and challenging conditions. But there is still a way to go for the technology to catch up, with paper often the dominant medium.
“If you are working on a line or on an offshore oil platform, you may not have access to a network. So we are doing a number of things around asset management to support the mobile workforce, where we do long form instructions and all the documentation is packaged up dynamically for that particular work order,” Gascho says.
The worker can then either print the information or download the electronic package onto an offline device to work with in the field.
“You get better preparation and the ability to work when the network is not working, which is usually the case when you are in a maintenance situation or an incident.”
