The ability to connect the control room to the board room has been a common talking point over the last few years as operating companies have increasingly strived for ways to make operations more efficient, and decision-making processes faster and better informed.
Rising operating costs and unstable oil prices, for instance, are forcing oil and gas companies to continuously lower their operating expenses. The same is true for other extractives industries such as metals and mining. Those companies must improve product quality and production efficiency while lowering the consumption of energy and reducing emissions.
To complicate things further, many of these operating companies typically have multiple production facilities geographically spread out, meaning expertise and best practices can be difficult to share and institutionalize across locations. Optimal production and productivity is hard enough to achieve on a single asset level, but interdependencies between processes and facilities complicate things even further.
And that’s not even taking safety into account: Production sites in remote locations present a variety of safety concerns, either in the hazardous environment of the operating facility itself (e.g., underground with risk of earthquakes, high altitudes, offshore with risk of hurricanes) or associated with transportation to these facilities (e.g., helicopter trips or long car trips over bad roads). Offshore operators, for instance, seek to improve safety by limiting helicopter flights and boat trips to remote facilities, and by reducing the number of people onboard platforms.
refer to:
http://www.automation.com/business-transformation-through-remote-collaboration-optimization-and-operations
