Consumerization of Enterprise Applications
Agility and usability of business applications is a critical and worthy challenge. A broad view on this topic was given by Gartner in their report “Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You”, stating “consumerization isn’t something to be “done,” it is a new way to view users and the tools they need to accomplish their day-to-day jobs. Viewing them as customers of your service, allows both the IT leadership and IT organization to shift from merely providing technology, to being a key success factor of the company”.

The IDG Enterprise Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) survey highlighted already in 2014, that in 2015/2016 “organizations expect to see CITE creating a positive impact in user satisfaction, user productivity, process efficiency and collaboration, and business agility”.

Bridging Information Technology and Field Personnel with Azure
A noteworthy solution provider in this area is Zimt Apps, with their latest implementation for oil-field workers at Hess Corporation, Texas. The fundamental idea from Zimt Apps goes beyond adding a wrapper around the ERP application, it’s remodeling the user experience to free the application’s potential to increase user productivity. What does this mean? Zimt puts the pieces together to access legacy SAP on-premise environments through the cloud to deliver browser and native mobile applications. The conduit between SAP, Zimt technology and application clients is Microsoft Azure, which simplifies deployment and provides complementary services through Azure, Office 365 and SharePoint.

Seamless Business Processes from Rig To HQ
Working closely with the Hess user team, Zimt tailored the Invoice Approval App to fit over 2,500 field users. It allows them to view all relevant contextual data from SAP and approve vendor invoices from the oil field, which has streamlined the approval time per invoice from an average of three minutes to under five seconds. Additionally, the intuitive user experience and familiarity to Microsoft Outlook meant that no training was required. “It used to take navigating and switching between 16 SAP screens to see all the information needed to make an informed decision on approving invoices, which was really problematic for the guys out on the fracking rigs in North Dakota,” stated Andrew Miller from Hess. “The Zimt App now pulls all of that information on to a single pane of glass where they can quickly make an informed decision and approve the invoice with a single click – they don ́t even know they are using SAP”

The Zimt technology encompasses three key areas: (1) For completely secure and validated data entry, the Zimt Foundation provides the Microsoft Azure cloud connection. (2) The ZPacks are pre-engineered, optimized data and logic packages that resolve the complexity of SAP to deliver everything required to maximize efficiency for a specific business process. (3) Finally, the App Assemblers are the building blocks for rapidly assembling fit-for-purpose Zimt Apps, tailored to the unique needs for each client organization.

The worthy result: Zimt Apps for SAP re-invent business process participation through a more sophisticated yet simplified and intuitive user experience. Everything needed for an SAP activity is on a “single-pane-of-glass”, personalized to each business process for instant user adoption and productivity.

The figure below shows Zimt infrastructure on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, leveraging complementary Azure services and Office 365 (source: Zimt Apps, http://www.zimtapps.com/)

Balance Security and Productivity with Ease and Peace-of-Mind
As Gartner underlined in their report, “for Enterprise IT, it is a fine balance between doing what’s in the best interest for the organization and what is in the best interest for their internal users. They are responsible for securing data, yet that is balanced with providing access to that data to the right person at the right time and in a manner which is easy to consume”. Now, with Microsoft Azure’s Trusted Cloud environment, this balance is much easier to achieve, paving the way to peace-of-mind AND mobile productivity, even in the oil fields.

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The oil & gas industry must continue to leverage digital technology advancements to create incremental value, gain efficiencies and reduce costs. The ongoing globalization of the energy supply chain, pricing pressures and tougher regulations beckon for faster innovation. This is further challenged by the loss of experience from an aging and departing workforce coupled with the distinct work styles of new knowledge workers.

Harnessing the power of information technology on the unprecedented volumes of collected data across the value chain can yield tremendous business insight for improved decision making. Through improved real-time management and analysis of these high volumes of diverse data, corporations can derive meaningful, timely and actionable insights.

The Microsoft IoT platform provides customers and partners with the capability to ingest, process, analyze, share and store their data in near-real time for business process improvement. For instance, machine learning and streaming analytics improve asset management through predictive maintenance. Additionally, providing field personnel with the right information at the right time enables higher productivity as well as increased safety. Beyond the improvement in day-to-day operations, these new tools such as Azure IoT Suite, Cortana Analytics and HoloLens are increasing innovation, promoting new business models and identifying new revenue opportunities for operating companies, service providers and equipment manufacturers.

We invite you to join the industry’s leading solution providers and your peers at the upcoming O&G IoT Summit in Houston on Sept 16-17 to participate in results-oriented sessions on how the Industrial Internet of Your Things is revolutionizing the oil & gas industry. Microsoft and several of our partners will be presenting how the Azure IoT Suite is delivering value to some of the largest oil and gas customers. These real-world solutions will provide valuable information and insight on how your organization can leverage existing investments, along with these breakthrough technologies, to become more productive, agile, and better able to anticipate and prepare for successful change.

The post Leaders in the oil and gas industry are looking to IoT to overcome the economic pressures of the oil price downturn appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

At the upcoming Energy Conference Network’s IoT in Oil & Gas summit in Houston, Sept. 16-17, 2015, Microsoft and several of our partners will be presenting how the Azure IoT Suite is delivering value to some of the largest oil and gas customers, by enabling more efficient business processes, greater productivity, safety and reliability. During the conference, Aegex will be showcasing its Windows-based industrial tablets, purpose-built for hazardous environments such as oil and gas, mining and chemical operations.

The availability of intrinsically safe tablets capable of safely and securely running the full gamut of enterprise applications fills a technology gap in this industry, that being, to fully equip the right people with the right information at the right time, in any location – including a potentially hazardous one. This incremental connectivity of people, things and systems will increase the productivity of all field personnel, including operations, maintenance and engineering, by providing timely and actionable information-driven insights about equipment and production, generated by IIoT and other business systems.

Under current cost-cutting market conditions, coupled with increasing compliance requirements and decreasing levels of workforce experience, Operational Excellence practices are imperative. To be market leaders, especially in these challenging times, enterprises must employ innovative solutions to attain new levels of collaboration, operations insight, business process efficiency and knowledge management in order to uncover the best business actions. By leveraging existing systems and intelligently deploying these breakthrough hardware and software technologies, oil and gas companies of any size can become more productive, agile, and achieve greater returns from existing assets, without increasing risks.

The post IoT and Mobile Devices go Hand-in-Hand appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

A loss of over $500 billion in the last five years – this was outlined by global oil majors including Shell, Chevron and Total this year in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Phew, what a statement! Cost overruns and delays were the main reason why oil majors generated less cash than shareholders expected when oil was over $100 per barrel. Industry research shows that over 100 large projects exceeded initial costs by a cumulative $400 billion in the past five years, according to participants in Davos. With oil now half that price, the urgency of addressing costs and delays rises by the day for producers. “In the 80s and 90s, we were very close to the projects and controlled costs and execution. In 2000s, when we became rich, we became less cost-efficient,” said Claudio Descalzi chief executive of Italy’s ENI, one of the oil majors that meet in Switzerland every year on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. This is a very revealing statement, indicative of the industry’s spending habits during boom times.

You may not be surprised that I would respond by pointing out that a significant part of the solution lies in information technology’s transformational capabilities. Beyond being a system of record to aggregate data and report on what happened in the past, it is a real-time system of engagement powered by web services, mobile devices and applications, which enable near-real-time access to information and collaboration for actionable insight in the present. With the exponential growth in storage, compute, visualization and learning abilities of the cloud unleashed on immeasurable data sources, IT is also the system of intelligence that empowers individuals, enterprises and industries to make the right decisions now, albeit with future projections in mind. Operations Excellence processes leverage these IT systems of intelligence to maximize business outcomes by optimizing existing assets, innovating for the future and achieving the necessary flexibility to counter the market rollercoaster.

Speed up and lower risks

But let’s first have a look to other’s opinions – for example IDC, which unveiled its top 10 decision imperatives as part of its worldwide oil and gas 2015 predictions. Their expectation: During the next three years, 40% of the oil and gas majors and all software divisions of oilfield services will co-innovate on domain specific technical projects with IT professional service firms. And further on capital efficiency: By 2015, 25% of the top 25 oil and gas companies will apply integrated planning and information to large capital projects to speed up delivery and lower over-budget risks by 30%.

Change and automate

McKinsey stated automation as an important answer to the industry’s upstream challenges, including production operations such as maximizing asset and well integrity (by which McKinsey means optimizing production without compromising health, safety, and the environment), increasing field recovery and improving oil throughput. McKinsey highlighted a further interesting point of the big crew change. The retiring petrochemical experts will leave a knowledge and experience gap, which is unlikely to be filled with retention and recruitment completely. This will drive efforts to codify many routine analysis and decision-support processes and, where possible, to automate them.

Analyze and collaborate

Such predictions correspond to a survey of 229 oil and gas industry professionals, conducted by Penn Energy in April 2015 on behalf of Accenture and Microsoft. Over the next three to five years, 80% percent of the oil and gas industry professionals surveyed said they plan to invest the same amount (18%), more (44%), or significantly more (18%) in digital technologies. Increased investments are expected especially in Big Data/Analytics, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Automation. The key driver: improve operational efficiency. The most significant effects are expected from analytical capabilities (40%), followed by collaboration (38%). Both will contribute to faster decisions, more informed decisions and therefore higher profitability. To overcome system borders is a further key challenge: Almost half of respondents think that innovation in interaction – human to machine, machine to machine, IIoT and automation – will facilitate cost reduction and the ability to manage more complex work beyond decision support. These technologies are all expected to increase in importance over the next three to five years, especially for remote asset management. Stay tuned for the next blog post with additional analyst findings.

Achieve Excellence

The conclusion: it is all about operations excellence – remember Claudio Descalzi’s statement from the beginning of this post – and focusing on the profitability of existing assets. This means increased margins by both reducing operating costs and improving production, recovery and yield.

Make decisions and take actions with:

• A clear view on the future: Near-real-time data insights go beyond just reporting on the past, by projecting into the future with Machine Learning for predictive analytics. This improves both asset utilization (optimize maintenance costs and reduce failures) and maximizes recovery, yield and production.
• No limits in computing: Big data techniques and hyper-scale compute power are enabled by the cloud, providing unprecedented real-time analyses with all relevant information driving better and timely actionable decisions.
• Concerted expert knowledge: With increasing responsibilities and consequences, coupled with decreasing hands-on expertise an innovative environment of collaboration and knowledge stewardship is vital to ensure the right people have all of the right information at the right time to make the best decisions. Stay in the know with Office Delve, bringing the most relevant information to light.
• Dynamic working environments: Greater mobility with fit-for-purpose applications and devices (including intrinsically safe devices for field operations) enable on-the-spot decision-making wherever and whenever necessary, without sacrificing relevant data and key work processes.

The current macroeconomic environment and its impact on lowered revenue streams may affect your ability to make IT investments at this time. However, consider the use of Payment Solutions to help modernize your IT environment, enabling you to drive greater operational excellence, starting today. A structured approach can be created to align with your budget, deployment schedule, and maximize your cash flow based on your business and technology requirements.

Expect more on best practices around operations excellence in the upcoming blog posts, including a dedicated post on how Payment Solutions can help in the oil & gas space.

The moral of today’s story: The latest plunge in oil prices has reminded us how little control we have and forewarning we get under the complex geo-political pressures that influence the modern-day world. It doesn’t take a psychic to predict continuous boom and bust of oil price cycles. So why not use technology to maneuver the highs and lows.

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