Digital twins have been talked about for years. But the conversation changes the moment they start delivering measurable impact in day-to-day operations.
Over the past year, one theme has come through clearly in the feedback we hear from users across offshore assets and complex heavy assets: Value becomes tangible when using digital visualisation tools. When teams can trust the asset context, information and data, and actually use it, expectations for what a digital twin can deliver shift fast.
There are 4 patterns we consistently see once digital twins move from "interesting" add-ons of technology, to "essential" pieces in the tool kit. The biggest hurdle when looking into digital twins isn't the technology itself, but the adoption built on data people can rely on for their daily work.
Offshore time is expensive, time consuming and carries unnecessary risk for workers. A lot of the trips offshore happen for one reason alone, which is to conduct a visual confirmation of something offshore, whether this be for maintenance, spatial clearance or verification.
When the right context is available in a digital twin, 3D scans and photogrammetry, work order, time series data, engineering information, teams have the ability to grasp a holistic picture of their facility and can plan work from anywhere.
One example we saw with a customer was around 10 offshore trips were avoided at a single facility, creating significant cost savings without the need to be on site for a physical inspection for a maintenance campaign. It is not about replacing the work at site, it is about eliminating the trips that exist only because teams didn't have enough confidence in what they already knew.
Ask any engineer in energy operations what slows work down, and often times you will get the same answer: being able to access and find the right information.
Not because the information doesn't actually exist but because it is scattered across tools, systems, data bases, and even amongst the drawers of onshore offices. In a lot of organisations, valuable time is still spent hunting for the latest revision, the correct document, the right tag, or the correct report of what was maintained and where.
When the information on your facility becomes available through a searchable environment, and connected in one place, your planning accelerates, decisions get made earlier and the actual execution of your work has fewer delays. The more complex the asset, the greater value you can realise with something as simple as finding information.
A common indicator of planning quality is how often maintenance jobs have to be replanned. When teams plan without the full understanding of the facility, the complete context, circling back through the planning phase becomes a normal occurrence. It means more hours, more rework and more disruption.
With better context, comes better planning. This means teams can understand the physical view around a job, validate constraints and spatial restrictions, and make sure they are aligned on the same "what and where" before work begins.
With one customer, we saw maintenance job replanning drop from 14% to 11% in a year. This is quite a significant reduction when you scale it across a large complex facility.
In every digital twin adoption journey there are some hesitations whether users have the "right" model, and what information you should trust. A perfect 3D model can offer you a lot, until it doesn't represent the data you are really working with. Reality capture information can give you a detailed view into the physical representation of your facility, until it is not connected to the updated data landscape.
When teams can realise the gaps in the data, they can work on them, understand the missing information and continuously improve. Without trust, the users will never fully rely on the twin and its information and ,ultimately, adoption stays low. And without adoption, the value is never fully grasped.
Want to learn more about how Aize helps the transformation?
Watch Kristian Grjotheim, VP Strategic Accounts, present at the Deep Water Development Conference:
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