Mining for innovation: How IoT is transforming Oil, Gas and Mining
We have been talking about the vast depth of change that is happening in every industry and in nearly all aspects of business through a new era of digital transformation. As part of this industry revolution, far-reaching changes in the oil, gas and mining industry require that organizations become more resilient in order to mitigate fluctuating oil prices and other market variables such as the globalization of the energy supply chain, increasing energy demands, and stricter regulations.
Companies require more flexibility in order to reinvent business processes and gain new operational efficiencies to maintain their competitive advantage, as well as to create a modern, productive workplace as they face continued labor shortages, changing demographics, a new millennial workforce, and varying ways of work. The digital transformation is upon us, reshaping the oil, gas and mining industry in new and exciting ways.
Technology is driving this paradigm shift, and it is creating new ecosystems around the opportunities it presents. Connectivity and automation technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and machine learning are helping companies reinvent productivity, business processes, mobility and their customer engagements as they face managing some the most complex set of challenges that the industry has ever seen. Some of those challenges are related to data, big or small or complex. In fact, IDC says that by 2016, 50% of oil and gas companies will have advanced analytics capabilities in place and McKinsey says that automation is an important answer to the industry’s upstream challenges, including production operations.
Today, we are already seeing exciting examples of oil, gas and mining companies embracing this digital transformation. Machine Learning is being used to monitor and predict seismic hazards in coal mines, for example. Schneider Electric is looking at the potential of IoT for mining operations to connect systems and devices to trigger “smart events” around things like miner safety and emergency response; ore tracking and energy management to improve mine operations; and smart asset management to enables predictive maintenance.
Freeport-McMoRan, one of the largest international natural resource companies, has made big bets in the transformative power of technology by using the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure to create an Industrial Internet of Things platform to improve their mining operations. This solution enables Freeport-McMoRan to extract meaningful insights from their data to improve decision-making and address such issues as safety improvement, asset management and optimization of mine operations. As a result, the company is able to be more agile, drive increased revenue, and stay focused on what matters most—mine production.
Rockwell Automation is delivering a degree of collaboration and visibility unheard of, in the oil and gas industry. The company is using Microsoft’s IoT and cloud services, including Microsoft Azure and Azure Machine Learning, to extend its business and provide managed monitoring and support for its products in the field. One exciting example of this is around the work Rockwell is doing to connect and monitor submersible pumps to avoid pump failures and lost production time.
Accenture’s Analytics Innovation Center in Singapore, in collaboration with the Economic Development Board and Microsoft, serves as an innovation hub for developing new approaches for the use of analytics in services related to procurement, public safety, resource utilization, smart grids, workforce effectiveness, and much more. The center helps companies generate real-time, actionable insights to drive more informed business decisions, improve service delivery capabilities, and deliver better services and outcomes for citizens.
Oil, gas, and mining companies can learn from these leaders about how they can leverage existing investments as well as implement new technologies to become more productive, agile, and be well positioned for tomorrow’s challenges.
What is happening in our industry is tremendously transformational. Microsoft’s role in all of this is, along with our partners, to empower our customers, our industries, and ecosystems to drive transformation through the power of digital technology so we all can thrive in this new era.
