Energy Transformation summary – the application of a requirements management approach – part 2
In this second summary blog of the Energy Transformation podcast series, the moderator, John Lusty, Industry Lead for Energy and Utilities Industry Marketing at Siemens DISW, joins John Nixon, Senior Director for Global Strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
In our first summary blog, we highlight Siemens as a software company, discussing the digital thread and providing a better understanding of Siemens Digital Industries Software and the Digital Lifecycle Excellence approach to data management and the Xcelerator platform in the Energy and Utilities (E&U) Industry.
Market volatility, energy transition and digitalization
In part 2 of this Siemens Digital Lifecycle Excellence series, we discuss the value of applying a requirements management approach to managing enterprise technical data in the E&U industry, which is significantly impacts global trends: market volatility, energy transition (ESG-environmental, social, governance), and digitalization.
>Listen to the second Energy Transformation Podcast for more information.
Industry standards and customer requirements demand a significant amount of data gathering; therefore, a company must consider environmental implications, which require examining the carbon footprint and the generated waste. In addition, investment houses like BlackRock, JP Morgan, and others have stated the need for a verifiable ESG plan that’s executable. So, these requirements are not merely ‘nice-to-haves’ but are necessary to continue moving forward to gain the capital investment required to keep everything operating.
Siemens possesses the ability to bring valuable digital lessons of aerospace, automotive, industrial machinery, and heavy equipment and make them available by cross-pollinating them into marine, offshore, oil and gas, and more. For example, reports by McKinsey, Price Waterhouse, and others discuss the lagging nature of the energy business and the construction industry behind manufacturing. However, the energy industry is catching up because we have been witnessing investments in several areas in the last decade, including manufacturing.
Energy industry requirement driven approach
The prospects for transformation are exciting, especially in areas like requirements management driven design, transcending into construction, with the receipt, installation, inspection, and commissioning occurring in the field. However, a systematic approach also drives it in the field. An inflection point has been witnessed in the last five years for the Energy Industry and a requirements-driven process from design through operations.
Like energy, this same process occurs in the mining industry, revolving around the contract. This process might begin with a Design-Build Memorandum (DBM), leading to a bid tender process for front-end engineering design or feed, with a contract aligned to a larger one. If the project is approved for detailed engineering, it could lead to more significant ventures for construction and commissioning – including all the steps required to get a new plant built and ready for startup.
There is an investment made in this process that drives requirements as objects. For example, the process in the past included sending documents to contractors to understand the logistics of responsibility for each specification. And it involves more than OCR (Optical Character Recognition) because it is necessary to intelligently extract requirements, ensuring a digital ecosystem that guides engineers through the design process.
Requirements must be integrated into the design process and tools. Those investments are present at Siemens, where they guide a company during design, construction and commissioning – with the ability to keep people within their lane as specifications require. This process reduces the potential for errors and omissions moving forward. There is an enormous amount of volume. And requirements can be random, constantly growing and increasing. Therefore, creating an object via the requirements and associating them with the design and construction process is challenging. Siemens is witnessing a rise in technology after these investments.
Shell using a Siemens requirements management solution
A recent press release explains how Shell adopted a Siemens requirements management solution approach. Shell is a very innovative company, and they’re using a this requirements management approach – a Siemens solution – and applying it to their global capital projects system. In the last three decades, there has been a need for a digital frontier of requirements management to support the vision of a capital projects program at several companies. Subsequently, in applying this approach, it’s exciting to see a requirements-driven environment where the digital meets the expectations of what management needs from these systems – thus, ensuring the performance of work, competence, and tracking it back to to meet the specification documents and objects within these documents.
In Shell’s case, they use Polarion solutions for requirements management, initially with a small number of controlled projects. Then, they rolled out to their entire global projects’ teams, with Shell and Siemens participating in a joint press release. Requirements management is merely one way of taking advantage of the Digital Lifecycle Excellence approach to data management.
Learn more in the second Energy Transformation Podcast.
For more information, check out the Digital Lifecycle Excellence webpage at www.siemens.com/dle.
Connect with the experts on this blog topic: John Nixon and John Lusty on LinkedIn.
Xcelerator, the comprehensive and integrated portfolio of software and services from Siemens Digital Industries Software, helps companies of all sizes create and leverage a comprehensive digital twin that provides organizations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation.
For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit siemens.com/software or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Where today meets tomorrow
