We have seen a shift, a big shift towards embracing the concepts of digital, which is to basically automate or project conventional methods into the digital space so that we can react faster. I mean, they don’t have to wait for the person on-site. Digital never sleeps, and there’s no walls in digital, but there’s still a P in digital, and that P is people. I can’t emphasize that enough. A lot of digital folks have failed when they tried to implement solutions that had no people looking at the information. We’re avoiding that mistake.
PS: What about the types of decisions that plants have been making during the past year regarding automation specifically? It’s a substantive digital investment, and we keep hearing about plants actually no longer planning three years out. They’re actually making the investments now.
KS: We’re seeing marriages of digital opportunities to enhance physical operations, to mitigate the risk of maybe a recurrence of COVID, or some other something. We’re seeing hope, we’re seeing the lights are coming back on, we’re seeing industries adapting.
There’s also something else we’re seeing—we’re seeing cyber attacks. You can’t ignore that at your site, if you don’t know when you’ve done your backups, if you don’t do your patch management. Your IT system is great, but your OT system is what keeps the machine running, and if that gets hit, you could be down, and it could cost millions. I’m not trying to scare people, but that’s what we’re hitting is, it’s not something that happens to somebody else now. Nobody wants to see that blue screen, or “Install money here to be able to see your screen.”
The other thing that we’re seeing, is that in the traditional approach, we had subject matter experts on a particular asset class, and they were experts at a facility or a region. (Now) the automation space has grown exponentially, so one person can’t possibly know the entire stack. What we’re seeing is the interconnectivity in the stack of issues that can cause a system to go down are no longer supported by one skillset.
We’re seeing the opportunity to help with digital. You have digital components that can ascertain the health of individual components, but apply analytics to basically expand the sphere of influence of our guys and gals to be able to focus on “there’s something wrong here,” and then be able to pull in the experts from all over the world. We call that the connected engineer program. That’s a big deal.
I think even our customers are like, “If I hire an IT guy, that means I can’t get a control person. If I hire a control person, I can’t get a chemical person.” (We say), “Well, what if I gave you 10% of all the best?” You can’t do that with a person, but with people. Nobody can know everything in the digital space, but you can be alerted to areas to focus. That’s what I’m excited about, is pulling these things together.
This story originally appeared in the July 2021 issue of Plant Services. Subscribe to Plant Services here.
