Summer reflections on O&M innovations in times of crisis
Welcome to our Summer 2020 newsletter! Our tradition is to keep it lazy and brief, knowing that our full newsletter will return in September. I will take this chance to reflect on the first half year from my holidays in Sichuan’s Qingcheng mountains.
There is little doubt that 2020 is one of toughest years ever… Some companies froze in their tracks, but many others launched transformation plans to address their needs, both immediate (remote support for instance) and long-term (reduce costs, risks and create new revenue streams). Especially in the seldom-optimized areas of Industrial Risk Management and Maintenance, I believe that Siveco is uniquely positioned to help implement such quick improvement projects, in China (where we have deployed our solution to many utility plants in the first half of the year) and all over Asia (in particular we have delivered several projects in Thailand at the peak the Covid-19 crisis and see a coming rebound in Southeast Asia) and beyond (readers may have heard of our recent project kick-off in Egypt).
On the product front, we continue to invest heavily in innovations at the bluebee® lab, our Shanghai R&D center dedicated to mobility, cloud and IoT:
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Remote support is now embedded in our bluebee® for smart glasses solution, allowing technicians using our app to call for expert support, making full use of the smart glass camera and AR display. Experts can view the live video feed in context with all technical data, historical records, IoT readings, in the back-office bluebee® cloud system.
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A new major release of our Risk Management & Asset Management platform bluebee® cloud is coming, currently under testing for a major client in Chongqing, incorporating BIM for O&M and IoT integration (already available in the current version, now improved with the latest technological developments). More on this in September!
Last month’s article “From performance dashboards to large touchscreen displays”, written around clients’ screenshots, drew many reactions and questions from readers. I will share the main findings here:
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Most companies comment that are still struggling with old “EAM” solutions with printed forms and error-prone manual input. Some have purchased corporate “Business Intelligence” (BI) tools, only to find they must develop reports from scratch and, if they need to show data from multiple systems, create an expensive “data warehouse”. In any case, such tools remain limited to viewing reports with no or limited interaction. For example, a large utility company is now forcing all their sites to collect monthly data in Excel, email the results, which are then compiled and uploaded manually into a BI data warehouse, for presentation of beautiful KPIs to the top management. As far as I know, the top management is not yet aware of this trick and the efforts involved: huge lead times, unacceptable administrative workload at site and group level, inaccuracy and data losses… Huge improvement could be obtained by upgrading this obsolete approach.
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Some readers commented that they have seen such screens “everywhere”. What we indeed see more and more is: modernized SCADA/DCS user-interfaces (displaying real-time automation data) and beautifully animated corporate showrooms (with static content like a website or semi-static from Excel sheets). What we are talking about with bluebee® dashboards is real-time Operation & Maintenance management data, obtained directly from end-users using the mobile app (no paper, no manual input), from IoT and from third-party systems (without data warehouses, without duplicating data). The most obvious difference is you can drill-down all the way to specific records (such as an incident report showing photos of what went wrong and detailed fault analysis) and open related functions (for example to open related asset data).
Since last month’s animated screenshot had such a big impact, here is another example of large touch-screen display used to manage the Reliability & Maintenance of around 100 small to midsize utility plants. It may look less interactive than the first example (it has less visual effects) but you can see the menu on the left-hand side that gives access to all functionalities of the system.
This is not just a pretty screen to impress the boss: the solution gives him unprecedented visibility into previously hidden disciplines, thus enabling rapid improvement. Keep in mind all “working” users use the bluebee® mobile app to conduct their daily work. Welcome to Smart O&M!
To grow our business in challenging times, we continue to rely on our network: we welcome referrals from clients, partners and friends! In particular many thanks to customers who keep giving us content in the form of testimonials and case studies (last month’s Yangzhou Taiyo Nippon Sanso Semiconductor Gases was the perfect example) but also often actively refer new business opportunities to us! For partners, our Value Added Partner Program (VAPP) remains in place to ensure win-win-win between Siveco, partner and client.
As I return for a few more days to the quiet natural beauty of Qingcheng mountains in beautiful Sichuan, I wish all our readers to also enjoy a nice summer, with holiday time away from work!
Bruno Lhopiteau
Managing Director
Siveco China
Managing Director
Siveco China
