You don't need to work in the energy industry to know the globally recognised brand that Shell has become. As a key part of the organisation, leadership at Norske Shell (Shell Norway) want to optimise production, operate sustainably, and help deliver great results for their customers while keeping their own workers as safe as possible.
The trouble is, nothing is a given in the energy sector.
Ensuring operational productivity and optimising uptime is a balancing act. Processes can be complex. The consequences of an unexpected issue that leads to downtime can be expensive — and even catastrophic.
Luckily, Norske Shell has made many critical investments and decisions that have paid off well over time. By recognising the value of data and embracing digitalisation many years ago, Shell has positioned themselves as a leader in a very competitive sector.
That’s not to say their teams don't face new and significant challenges all the time, but they are fairly well-equipped to deliver on their high-level goals.
Leaders at an organisation like Shell typically want to operate more efficiently, maximise safety, optimise production, streamline and automate operations, and drive full value from their technology investments.
Energy industry teams like those from Shell generally aim to:
- Operate more efficiently
- Maximise safety
- Optimise production
- Streamline and automate operations
- Drive full value from their technology investments
An important part of Shell Norway’s efforts to reach those goals comes thanks to a long-term collaboration with Kongsberg Digital.
For the past few years, Kongsberg Digital teams have worked hard to develop the Digital Twin — or The Twin — that has now evolved into the Industrial Work Surface.
Just about any organisation involved in heavy-asset industries will quickly see the benefits of having an interactive, 3D digital model of key plants and facilities with critical data mapped to specific points across it. But the visualisation and integration capabilities take Kongsberg Digital’s digital twin solution to an entirely different level.
Outlining the full list of benefits would require a lot of space, so to summarise, the Industrial Work Surface is a data operations platform that is giving teams a better way to visualise, orchestrate, and automate their complex work. It helps organisations that operate in industrial sectors facilitate more productive, cost-efficient, and reliable operations through a single interactive user experience.
And whether you refer to it as the Industrial Work Surface or The Twin – it's all about putting the most effective technology in the hands of experienced humans who can then deliver the best possible results for their organisation.
Here are a few of the ways the Industrial Work Surface is helping key personnel at Norske Shell reach their goals more easily.
1. Optimise production by spotting potential failures before they happen.
Productivity disruptions aren’t very welcome in any sector, really. But across heavy asset industries like energy, surprise shutdowns that lead to unexpected downtime are especially intolerable.
It's why Norske Shell has a Reliability & Digital Engineer as good as Alfred Nerland on the team.
He must work to identify problems before they happen. But if they happen — he tries to find out why so they can avoid similar incidents in the future.
And this is just the start. Alfred says he can "imagine a future where The Twin could adjust the entire plant autonomously."
So, not only can the Industrial Work Surface help find potential failures before they happen, but it can also tell his team what spare parts they need to fix the problem quickly.
2. Maximise uptime through more effective isolation plans.
As an Operations Manager at Shell Nyhamna, Dave Andreas Øiangen's team is responsible for delivering isolation plans. In other words, they are looking to isolate equipment out in the field for repairs and maintenance — and vitally, to help protect workers from dangerous situations.
It's not a big deal or anything. Dave just needs to keep the plant running while special teams perform maintenance work!
Here, it's useful to remember that it's not simply the technology doing the work. Rather, it is people who are leveraging powerful, intuitive tools to achieve higher quality work in faster, better ways that make the difference.
3. Predict energy consumption more accurately for energy nomination processes.
As an Operations Digital Engineer with Shell since 2019, Arnela Fazlija works directly with the digital twin capabilities of the Industrial Work Surface just about every day.
Arnela is involved in many critical stages of work that include initial use cases, rolling solutions out, and then making sure they deliver sufficient value over the long term.
She shares a bit about a use case involving energy nominations.
"Before, this was a time-consuming and manual process, which required quite a lot of different systems you need to look into to do the trends and analysing."
All these kinds of use cases are built together with Shell engineers and based on their domain knowledge. But in just a few clicks, authorised users can examine different operating scenarios to gather data and insights that will be critical to operational safety, efficiency, and compliance.
4. Plan and execute work faster and more effectively.
Again, in her role as a Production Coordinator for Norske Shell, it's Silje Helen's job to approve work permits and make sure that the organisation avoids conflicts on-site.
She says "With the digital twin, we get an easy visual overview of where the work will take place — and I can instantly see where there will be conflicts with simultaneous operations."
5. Perform critical work tasks more efficiently.
As a Senior Electrical Engineer with Aker Solutions, Audun Herskedal's skills and 20 years of experience are key to many Norske Shell initiatives.
In this role, one of his tasks is to create overviews of the planned work for laying cables. That can entail sketching out routes and creating graphics for people on-site to use when needed.
As a part of that work, Audun must regularly perform site surveys — and follow each cable to make sure it's routed correctly. It's a critical task, requiring diligence and accuracy, but technology from Kongsberg Digital makes it much easier.
Audun admits that working with a digital twin is a major shift from the way he used to work, but it's all for the better.
"Now, we can spend more time on the actual engineering job rather than looking for information."
6. Increase collaboration between disciplines and locations.
As Vice President at Norske Shell, Marianne Olsnes shares a note that sheds light on why the organisation has been successful more broadly.
"Here, we view digitalisation as one of our key levers to ensure we stay competitive and unleash the full potential of our people and our business."
She tells us that the pace of work has only accelerated over time. Along the way, they've developed new partnerships with technology experts and adopted new technology platforms that are more intuitive and powerful. Inherent to those partnerships are efforts to simplify collaboration across business units — and even with select business partners.
Any technology that helps streamline those efforts is welcome.
Marianne shares that the power of the digital twin has been transformational.
"This empowers our teams to turn data into insights and insights into actions that further improve our performance."
