Can you spot the Big data gems accelerating your O&G business Profitability?
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Digitalizing Downstream Refining and petrochemicals
One of the oft repeated question about Big data is what data are we talking about and which among those are aiding the digital profitability and where should our focus be? The plain simple answer is in fact, all of them can be part of Big data and are aiding the journey to the Top Quartile (TQ) performance in an unprecedented way!
Bigger the Better!
The data that comes out from the refinery and petrochemicals are enormous. Its starts with a few megabytes of data to Gigabytes in days to terabytes and petabytes soon before we realise the storage is not enough and not sure what we do with this vast trove of digital treasures and how do we pick out the gems from this Big data?
By the way, what is aiding this Big data? The advancement in sensor technologies, large-scale data transfer, storage and data mining at a relatively lower cost is heralding a transformational shift in the economy. The amount of data available from an automated Petroleum industry is enormous. These data could be extracted from the plant assets permitting continual monitoring and analysis.
Gems in Different Size and Shapes
These data comes in many formats, for example, the regular structured data from the plants to equity stock performance in the market (time series data) which can be stored in RDBMS format and queried in sql (Its there for quite long time now) to the unstructured data such as plant logs, inspection report and any form of written reports could be digitised and queried ( Nosql). India's Aadhar capturing over a billion people’s data is a nice example.
Capture the Light and Sound too!
Similarly the visuals ( digitised visuals) can be harnessed from any source right from safety incidences to Inspection of vessels & columns to the small analogue instruments in the plant such as the pressure gauge readings . Even the sounds produced by the machines ( pumps, compressor etc) could be harnessed. But these needs to be in the hands of Digital savvy O&G experts.
Gold Hunters
We see these datas everywhere and realise these datas are interconnected too from our past experience. Their interconnectivity could be analysed much more in detail to seek the meaning which was hard till yesterday. The meanings gained ultimately leads you to Digital profitability but before we reach there
Diamonds need Polishing!
The datas thus received are like raw diamonds that needs cutting, polishing etc before our eyes captures its lustre. Similarly data received from disparate sources needs to cleaned, formatted before we can apply tools such as Artificial Intelligence(AI), data analytics etc to mine. Industry sources reveals typically its about 80% of the work is data cleaning before we can apply AI suite of tools. Looks very similar to diamond business.
Where are those Digital $?
Once we have this in place, next comes the interesting dialogue! Show me the Money!