Celebrating Work Anniversary

At the end of one year, my decision to start providing sales consulting / advisory services / reselling solutions as a business partner, is slowly starting to pay-off, more so because of choosing the right companies to work with, namely Detect Technologies, Intelligent Project Solutions (IPS) and CAXperts.

The interesting fact about the offerings from the above-mentioned companies, is that, the solutions complement each other and are targeted at the same end customer- belonging to the oil & gas and process and power domain. CAXperts is renowned for its Universal Plant Viewer (UPV) – a solution for a single-point-of-truth model, including all data, attributes, and documents and as such an ideal digital twin platform. Detect Technologies’ core development is around real-time asset integrity monitoring, man-power monitoring, safety monitoring & progress monitoring. Their products namely NOCTUA and T-Pulse deploy AI/ML/CV algorithms to report defects in assets as well as report safety violations during a shutdown / turnaround. These solutions fit into the “predictive maintenance” slot, providing data analytics, on-premises or as a cloud-based SaaS offering. The principal mission of IPS’ technology is to digitize engineering data, migrating dumb data to an intelligent format. The current focus is on P&IDs & data sheets as these are the key documents pertaining to a plant. Data sheets include Instrument data sheets, Equipment data sheets, Vendor Data sheets and the like. The technology is built on AI/ML algorithms, trained on symbols and legends specific to the customer, and can be deployed both on-premises as well as on the cloud as a SaaS offering.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) are emerging technologies that are here to stay, slowly replacing human effort for repetitive tasks and rightly so, this being one of the main intents for deploying these technologies. Another important intent for which AI/ML is relied on is to improve decision making processes with more and more training and this is an ongoing process of enriching the learning data.

My choice of companies (where I am engaged as an advisor/ business partner) has helped create an ecosystem enabling each of these companies reach their target customer, directly or through common partners and equally bringing the synergies of their complementary solutions to the common end customer.

COVID 19 and a slow-down in the oil & gas market has set the tone for the following:

1.   Companies have been forced into a “cash preservation” mode and the focus has shifted now to plant operations & maintenance - reducing plant down time & improving productivity with predictive maintenance data analytics, thereby reducing O&M costs.

2.   Digitizing important engineering data not only to keep up with the industry 4.0 requirements but also because we are more and more embracing the concept of working from different geographies on a work share mode in response to the new normal that has been introduced by COVID 19 – Working from Home.

3.   Public cloud based systems offered in a SaaS model are the need of the moment, allowing access to key data, from different geographies , as well as ensuring data is stored in a secured environment.

Summary - I strongly believe that the offerings from the three companies that I work with cater to the “need of the moment” for the end customer. A trait that is common among the three companies is that they are on a continuous innovation path, deploying cutting edge technologies. Finally, we are at the stage where this ecosystem is just about starting to pay dividends to all parties and nothing can be more fulfilling than this.