Digital Transformation – Is Aiming for Digitalisation Enough, or Does Future Pipeline Integrity Management Require an Industry 4.0 Approach?

It is well recognised within the pipeline engineering community that digital transformation of the industry will happen, and that this must happen with an increasing pace of uptake.

Computing capabilities and data sources are changing at an incredible rate and we have the opportunity to improve on current integrity management processes. The sheer volume of data now available has the potential to enable better assessment of the problems commonly faced by pipeline operators, but does pose additional problems for traditional methods of managing data, and methods of performing further work with the data available; all of which must be solved efficiently.

Ultimately digital transformation will force a radical change in many companies’ business strategy. The authors share recent experience of some of the common pitfalls and roadblocks which can be encountered when transferring away from traditional management and use of data as part of digital transformation; and go on to detail some of the lessons learned by Penspen as part of Penspen’s digital transformation process.