After years of digital transformation reaching only as far as the corporate back office, improved connectivity is finally bringing it to the field in the energy sector. This shift is vital as the industry faces a dual crisis: significant knowledge erosion due to a retiring workforce and the intensifying pressure to deliver reliable, affordable and decarbonised energy.
Over the past eighteen months, Innovior has worked on several different, but interrelated initiatives that are improving decision making for field services teams. By implementing source data remediation, digitising operations and digitising front line leader routines, companies can effectively capture vanishing institutional knowledge and transform it into the real-time operational intelligence required for the energy transition.
Let’s look at each of these individually:
Before organisations can reap the rewards from their AI tools, they need source data they can trust. Otherwise, organisations risk spending millions on AI and digital improvement projects, only to find themselves with outputs that are incorrect or totally unusable.
Source data remediation removes that risk by cleaning, standardising and validating fragmented, legacy or inconsistent data. Source data quality is arguably the single biggest barrier to meaningful AI rollouts across the industry, especially when considering operational use cases. This is because many organisations are working with remote sensors, decades-old control systems and bespoke applications that were never designed to feed analytics.
It's common to find tooling built by a single engineer decades ago, that only that person fully understands - and with roughly a quarter of the energy workforce nearing retirement, that knowledge is at risk. This makes source data remediation a knowledge-transfer tool as well as the key to digital transformation, and the use of AI.
When harnessed properly, source data enables reliable digital twins and production modelling that let teams think six, twelve or eighteen months ahead – optimising settings before incidents occur and materially reducing cost to produce. This improves affordability and reliability across the energy system, which matters for the broader energy transition into the future.
Digitising front line operations converts manual, paper-based processes into automated workflows by connecting the "boots on the ground" to the existing technology stack.
If this doesn’t happen, organisations are forced to continue making decisions on lagging, inaccurate or partial data, safety risks aren’t identified in advance and the knowledge in the field doesn’t reach the back office.
To solve this problem, the temptation for many organisations is to extend their core enterprise systems - ServiceNow, Salesforce or SAP - with bespoke code to fit each operational workflow. This creates added burden for organisations and execution risk as the systems may simply not be fit for purpose and become difficult to support long term, creating significant “technical debt”.
That’s the approach Innovior generally recommends, and it is the strategy deployed within several core offerings including digital well planning and centralised accommodation management. Before these solutions, activities were previously managed across spreadsheets, PDFs, macro-driven workbooks and email chains.
In other words, technical work was prone to mistakes. In both of these examples, the new system is a lightweight low-code application with in-built thresholds to manage operational expectations, and in some cases safety risk.
Within Digital Well Planning, the app collects all planning inputs and produces a single, formatted drilling specification for contractors in line with these thresholds. If a planned parameter falls outside allowable limits, the system automatically flags it for manager approval, preventing unsafe activities from reaching the well head without oversight.
By digitising core processes and leveraging data analytics, we help operational teams reclaim valuable time, improve overall performance and maintain the highest safety standards in this complex industry.
In heavy industry, the difference between a profitable shift and a loss-making one often comes down to how quickly a team reacts to an unexpected change. Short Interval Controls (SIC) is the epicentre of heavy industry keeping this reaction time short - eliminating the information lag that drives operational waste and safety risks.
Innovior is partnering with a change management consultancy to bring digital Short Interval Control to market. The discipline has already been approved in its manual form at a major mining operator with operations in Tanzania, renewable energy generation and aluminium smelting in New Zealand, where shift-level routines – the schedule of routines performed by site supervisors – were inconsistent, paper-based and hard to scale.
Without rigorous shift-level routines, small errors can quickly snowball into multi-million-dollar losses or life-threatening incidents.
In each of these examples, the existing work practices were fragmented – including notes on butchers’ paper, ad-hoc handovers and no reliable way for site managers or regional leaders to spot trends across shifts. That made it difficult to spot emerging or recurring production variances, close safety gaps quickly or capture the knowledge of experienced operators.
We are creating a digital framework that takes that discipline further, replacing paper-based processes with a digital whiteboard, and ad-hoc handovers with live, site-level and regional trend data across production and safety.
The benefits of this evolution for the energy sector go beyond production. When operational judgement is systematised, it means an operator with 18 months’ experience can safely use machinery as well as someone with 18 years’ experience - lowering barriers to entry and broadening the recruitment talent pool. A third, newer module is also specifically designed to manage wellbeing, and ensure mental health risks are being managed as actively as physical safety risks.
The digital transformation that is paying off in upstream energy is making frontline execution consistent, more measurable, safer and greener. To learn how source data remediation, low-code workflow digitisation and digital SIC could optimise your sites, contact Innovior .