The trend of the large traditional Independent Oil Companies transitioning from the North Sea has provided opportunities for smaller, independent operators to acquire these mature offshore assets. Frequently, these operators need to partner with a business technology solutions provider to deliver the migration of their Asset from the divesting operator into their ownership, set up their IT architecture and applications and manage the data transition; that’s where Sword comes in.

Case study – Serica Energy

When Serica Energy acquired BP’s stake in the Bruce, Keith and Rhum fields, Sword was engaged by Serica due to its proven experience in the industry. For some critical specialised areas, Sword secured help from its ecosystem partners to ensure the best possible outcome.

For real time, process control and surveillance data, Intelligent Plant was engaged to provide its expertise based on products from its Industrial App Store.

The project took six months in total, from scoping and definition, design and development and through to implementation and cutover. The final transition took place at the end of November 2018 as part of a carefully planned sequence of cutover activities covering all IT services.

Helen Ratcliffe, Energy Sector Consulting Lead at Sword, commented: “Sword was excited to be awarded this contract from Serica Energy. Serica showed openness to working with new technologies and were very interested in identifying innovation from within the local supply chain. The complex nature of the project opened the opportunity for Sword to work with a partner who also understood these complexities. Sword and our partner Intelligent Plant were able to ensure that Serica has a technology landscape that reflects its strategic direction.”

Steve Aitken, Consultant Director at Intelligent Plant, said: “When the team from Sword engaged us initially, it was to talk about PnID and Trend, our apps that were designed to turn process engineers into data scientists. During this initial discussion, it became clear to us that there was an opportunity to work together on a wider scope, and for Serica to use a suite of our apps, including PnID, Trend and Alarm Analysis. Collectively, these apps allow a user to understand the status of important processes, as well as being able to analyse and manage alarms and events.”

“We were delighted to be invited to work with Sword and Serica on this opportunity, as it is extremely rare that you are given a blank canvas from which to create a new IT framework, and on a scale of this size. Both ourselves and Sword are now exploring opportunities to use the experience that we gained working together on this project, for the benefit of the wider industry.”

Benefits to engaging Intelligent Plant and Sword as a partnership service?

Many companies use automated control systems to manage their plants or facilities. Integrated or distributed control systems provide the possibility to monitor, analyse and predict equipment performance along with alarm management capabilities, as was the case in Serica’s situation.

Accessing valuable data remotely can be problematic with challenges observed around cyber security over VPN, meaningful data visualisation and integration with other systems to realise the true value of data.

Intelligent Plant’s connected platform allows data to be queried directly from these control systems via cloud apps with a connector installed in the client networks, then displayed in a way which the engineers or operators at any location prefer to consume the data, whilst protecting the security of these critical systems.

Sword has experience in supporting the Intelligent Plant platform by providing an integrated service for several clients. This is achieved by Sword and Intelligent Plant working together to:

• Plan the design and installation of the connector to avoid any cyber threats in the clients’ network.

• Input to the design, facilitation of accessing the data core and integration with other applications (such as connecting data as a foundation for a Digital Twin).

• Design and/or maintain master data models to support collation and maintaining of all the data at source during change, ensuring the engineers and operators are accessing trusted data.

• Design data flows and integrations ensuring a single point of truth across all applications.

• Provide IT support to the core applications where they are already in place.

• Design, deploy and support Power Bi Dashboards and other visualisation tools using data scientists.

• Provide on- or off-premises ongoing IT Operational support.

Who is Intelligent Plant and what does it do?

Intelligent Plant is well known for providing the world’s first truly open & secure IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) portal known as the Industrial App Store (IAS).

The IAS enables secure, remote, performance monitoring of equipment and processes through storage, analysis, and visualisation of real-time data, and in the management and interpretation of process alarm data. It links access to your data with a SaaS based App Market.

What makes the Industrial App Store unique in this space is that your data remains on your network, under your control, you can put it on a physical machine, or an Azure instance/AWS it does not matter. This removes the requirement for cloud-specific data processing fees or architectures - which ultimately saves money and more importantly, allows you to retain full control of your data. It provides the right data to the right people at the right time – centralised and automated data flows, as well as effective visualisations & dashboards, it provides immediate access to current data without any time spent facilitating the request.

The App Store is also completely open to all App developers, removing the huge restrictions other vendors put on usage of and access to your data.

For more information on Intelligent Plant, please visit https://www.intelligentplant.com/