Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE) and KBC a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corporation, have announced a preferred partnership that will provide a combination of process simulation, asset performance management and operational software solutions to the oil and gas industry.
Leveraging GE’s Predix, the platform for the industrial internet, to deliver one unified view, this partnership extends KBC’s Petro-SIM process simulation modeling further into the fullstream oil and gas value chain, and provides connectivity between operations, assets, people and business processes for end-to-end optimisation.
Integrating KBC technology with BHGE’s suite of digital solutions will allow customers to reduce bottlenecks in facilities, processes and equipment to achieve optimal production and lower risk. By integrating data analytics connected by seamless workflows between facilities and operations, the time spent to analyse operations will be significantly reduced and the insight gained will increase production, reduce energy usage and improve product quality consistency.
'This partnership showcases our commitment to break down data 'silos', and is an ideal example of the convergence of process and operational thinking,' said Matthias Heilmann, chief digital officer of BHGE. 'For the first time, oil and gas customers can build a digital twin of a plant, refinery or rig, that incorporates end-to-end process and operational analytics and machine learning. With Petro-SIM providing simulation technology to our fullstream portfolio, this best-in-class solution will bring us into a new era of operational improvement.'
KBC’s Petro-SIM simulation technology already connects to cloud-based Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data-as-a-service solutions to remotely monitor and help improve customers’ process operations. With full integration to commercial data historian and database systems, the KBC technology offers a central repository for process topology, and stream and equipment data, with access to live and historical plant operating data for performance monitoring.
