Energy Majors Standardizing Digital Supply Of Spare Parts

Some of the world’s largest energy companies have now signed an Industry Collaboration Agreement to set an industry standard for a digital inventory ecosystem.

ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies and Vår Energi – together with the software company Fieldnode – made a commitment to develop a digital foundation to build a network for supply of spare parts produced on demand through additive manufacturing technology.

The agreement is a two-year partnership with the goal to scale up the digital ecosystem to drastically reduce lead times, physical inventories, total cost of ownership, materials waste and reduce shipping distances, improving the overall environmental impact, efficiency, and security of the supply chain.

The technology to achieve the above-mentioned benefits is available, however, to really scale this, the partners in the collaboration see it necessary to establish a fit for purpose standard process to utilize the technology and transact in the new ecosystem and have therefore entered the collaboration, to solve the challenges together which the whole energy sector would benefit from.

Standardization around qualification processes, a new commercial model that caters for mass customization and improved total cost of ownership for customer vs. traditional volume-based incentives, are some of the areas that are set out to be addressed in the collaboration project.

To reach the set goals the partners in the collaboration intend to progressively invite their current suppliers, independent additive manufacturers as well as other suppliers to collaborate on the platform throughout the two years to ensure the whole industry can benefit from this transformation.

By collaborating with the above-mentioned entities, the project partners intend to both test the technical and commercial solutions as well as fill the digital inventory with content.

The foundational technical solution is the Fieldnode platform which was developed through a Joint Industry Project with Fieldnode, Equinor, and TotalEnergies.

The platform facilitates efficient and resilient operation of supply networks to support the oil and gas operators to share limited supply chain resources. The collaboration agreement gives the opportunity to further develop needed industry standards to scale this and thereby secure supply of spare parts and at the same time reduce the environmental footprint.

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