Siemens PLM Optimizing Offshore Industry Manufacturing

Rajiv Ghatikar, Vice President and General Manager for ASEAN/Australasia of Siemens PLM Software, shares his opinion on the Asian offshore shipbuilding market:

How is the Asian oil and gas market expanding?

Asia Pacific’s oil and gas industry continues to grow, accounting for 56 percent of the increase in global primary oil demand between 2000 and 2010. The Baker Institute estimates that between 2010 and 2020, Asia Pacific will account for 70 percent of the global oil demand. Boosted by the development of both onshore and offshore gas markets and driven by growing regional demand and high gas prices, Asia Pacific’s oil and gas industry accounts for nearly a quarter of global exploration and production expenditure. According to recent reports, the global expenditure was set to hit a record US$723 billion in 2014. With the region’s strong economic fundamentals and rapid population growth and economic development, the demand for energy will continue to grow and that brings opportunities for international companies to tap into this market.

What does this mean for offshore technology?

Sources such as CIMdata have highlighted that companies within the offshore marine and oil and gas industry are not consistently achieving the maximum value from their IT investments. In order to ensure their viability against competition, businesses within the oil and gas industry need to maximize benefits by tailoring product lifecycle management solutions for company specific needs whilst incorporating industry best practices. Furthermore, companies must also dully implement product lifecycle management (PLM) technology to maximize the value from their investment and close the value gap between investment potential and return realized. 

Companies will need to implement smart innovation platforms that will take a digitalization approach to innovation. The key to success within the oil and gas industry is to embrace digitalization as a fundamental approach to innovation. Product design will be based on smart models, with the product model setting the objectives needed to create the actual product. 

With ASEAN’s rise in the oil and gas sector, this can only mean that technological advancements will need to keep up with the pace the industry is moving at. With the demand for energy continuously growing, companies will need to find solutions that will increase productivity and efficiency, whilst remaining cost effective. 

Another key consideration for manufacturers is sustainability, especially in the oil and gas industry. We are seeing a spike in demand for advanced technology solutions that help save all three - time, cost and energy. 

What products/services do you provide for oil and gas?

Some of the key business trends and challenges that are currently affecting the industry revolve around the issue of efficiency. To address this issue, Siemens PLM has created new solutions for the oil and gas industry by unifying design, engineering, manufacturing and delivery teams through an open PLM platform. The platform will enable customers integrate their data in a more cohesive way allowing them to manage their entire enterprise. Siemens PLM’s oil and gas owners/operators solution enables users to define a coherent information management strategy to consolidate information by using a high-definition PLM for overall visibility and optimal decision making. 

The Siemens PLM solution enables a holistic approach that improves total enterprise collaboration, synchronization and productivity as well as lifecycle ship service and support. Some of these services include: 

1)    Product lifecycle management software for oil and gas industry owner/operators 
2)    Enterprise information and process management
3)    Corrective and preventative action planning and execution
4)    Supply chain management 

What research and development does Siemens have underway?

Siemens PLM is currently working on a number of solutions to provide better and faster tools to address the needs of the shipbuilding and oil and gas industry. Oil and gas providers across Southeast Asia have begun to realize the inherent need to seamlessly support the evolution of product definition across product lifecycle from conception all the way to the end of life. This includes providing an intuitive and seamless design environment for all project stakeholders – internal and external and unifying information throughout the enterprise by providing a single source of complex information and interlocking product design and development using an open PLM platform. 

Furthermore, Siemens PLM’s 4TH Generation Design (4GD) is the company’s newest design and data management model to enable designers to leverage an all-encompassing PLM environment in order to virtually create, test and troubleshoot a vessel’s design before it is physically built. With rich end-to-end product lifecycle management solutions, the digital transformation of the shipbuilding process can grow and become a vital part of the business. A strong PLM platform used to its full capacity can help shipbuilders support robust configuration management and manufacturing integration, maintain affiliation across the entire life lifecycle and enable the synchronization of all operations. 

Additionally, Siemens PLM has also begun bringing together all the elements needed to define and create a complete Digital Factory, from the ideation through manufacturing, in support of the future of digital enterprise initiative. By doing so, companies will be able to easily manage the full product definition within a single environment. It is also the first company worldwide to bundle all the capabilities for the digital factory into one solution, resulting in smarter decisions that can help build the right product through reducing manufacturing costs, increasing quality performance and enable more frequent development of complex products. 

We are very clear about delivering a smart innovation platform that is set to change the industry as we see it. We are investing in software solutions to realize innovation and power our customers’ digital enterprise moving from the conceptual to the real, connection the virtual development and production planning with the real production environment and lifecycle support.

Lastly, we are partnering with other organizations that are thought leaders in their respective fields so we can harness our research and development tools to solve larger industry challenges. In Singapore we work with ARTC as part of a regional think tank and industry body. ARTC has signed a MoU with industry leaders such as Rolls-Royce, Boeing and Siemens to translate remanufacturing and advanced technologies to the industry through public-private partnerships. With the help of this unique model which brings together R&D, Institutes of Higher Learning, and industry players including MNCs and SMEs, we can work together and more efficiently towards a technological advanced sustainable future. Our project with ARTC caters to the needs of the shipbuilding and marine industry. We’ll be working on solving the welding-related issues for Singapore ship and rig builders using our solutions on the ARTC platform. The project began in November 2014 and will be completed in June 2015.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed herein are the author’s and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.