Industry Could Struggle to Attract, Retain Staff Without IIOT

The oil and gas industry could find it hard to attract and retain staff if it doesn’t adopt the industrial internet of things (IIOT), Andrew Hird, vice president and general manager of Digital Transformation at Honeywell Process Solutions, told Rigzone.

Speaking at the EMEA HUG conference held in The Hague, Hird stated that IIOT will drive new technologies and outlined that if the upstream oil and gas sector does not allow these new technologies to be deployed, it may lead to staffing issues within the industry.

“We may actually get to a point where we find it very difficult to hire and retain the key resources that we need,” Hird told Rigzone.

“Think about a millennial, they’re used to having a very collaborative set of tools, they’re used to experimenting with applications and they’re used to a very different environment than what we would put them in, particularly in upstream. Our customers’ ability to hire and retain people is predicated upon us employing better technologies in upstream oil and gas,” he added.

IIOT Pushing Safety

Hird stated that the deployment of IIOT within the oil and gas industry could also drive safety improvements in a number of ways.

“Firstly ... we can get more people out of harm’s way,” he said.

“Moving data around and doing things like remote operation and remote optimization centres can actually reduce the number of people in hazardous environments. A good example is we’ve completely de-manned a lot of offshore oil and gas rigs,” Hird added.

Hird also outlined that one of the key enabling technologies of pushing an IOT deployment is improving process reliability through reducing the number of unplanned equipment failures. The Honeywell GM went on to state that knowledge-sharing could be another way IIOT could drive safety within the industry.

“By bringing to bear the entire organization’s knowledge, you can avoid process upsets. One key issue around incidents in facilities is through human error, and if you can, instead of having just the local site responsible for how you run the facility, if you can bring to bear through remote operations technologies, the entire organization – now you have the subject matter expertise of everybody in your facility able to do expert guidance and remote process troubleshooting,” Hird told Rigzone.

“Expanding that even further, Honeywell’s looking to develop an ecosystem of partners. So we could also bring to bear the knowledge of the process licenser to help,” he added.

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