Part 1 of blog series written by my colleague Hisham Gouda (
hisham.gouda#about) was
Leveraging SAP Intelligent Enterprise to Support Industry 4.0 for Oil, Gas, & Energy Companies | SAP... focused more on Industry challenges & trends, the overall evolution of the production and manufacturing platform & software. Also, the key building blocks of Industry 4.Now.
In this blog post I will be focusing more on the following
Strategic themes for Leading Oil & Gas Companies with reference to Industry 4.Now
- Sustainable Facilities
- Intelligent Assets
Sustainable Facilities
The first strategic Industry 4.0 Now theme is Sustainable Facilities. Oil & gas customers are seeing a need to make efficient use of hydrocarbon and energy while still producing at a high quality. They are also forced to react quickly to changing demands and unforeseen events. An example of this would be around the Covid-19 pandemic, where we have seen many O&G customers quickly adapt their facilities to run with minimum manpower and improve the worker health and safety.
Oil & Gas companies are doing this by using intelligent data analytics for optimizing their maintenance and operation integrating plant real control system with business systems.
An example of it would be
SASREF which is a Saudi company wholly owned by Saudi Aramco, where the objective of the program was to have greater competitiveness, profitability, and efficiency for the Saudi Vision 2030 program and global energy-mix changes and to achieve Digital business transformation for more flexibility, agility, and responsiveness.
During the transformation they used the SAP S/4HANA & IT-OT integration they achieved following:
- Greater asset utilization and control of shutdowns
- Lower spend and total cost of ownership by streamlined procurement, optimal use of SAP software, less customization, and legacy sunset
- Native integration of SAP solutions for lower interface cost and simpler application lifecycle management

Refining - Horizontal and Vertical Integration
Intelligent Assets
The second strategic Industry 4.Now theme is Intelligent Assets. A company’s assets are at the heart of serving customers, yet companies lack real time information about assets and operations are maintaining them reactively without considering condition, risk, and criticality. With Industry 4.Now, assets can be connected, even across networks to ensure operations teams have latest insights into real time condition data. This can drive planning processes for criticality, risk and reliability and operational processes for maintenance using predictive forward-looking techniques. With industry 4.Now, customers can ensure their supply chains are resilient by monitoring the health of their assets and prioritizing maintenance activity to manage risk and criticality.
With SAP and Industry 4.Now, customers will be able to have following benefits:
- Avoid downtime of equipment and increase overall operational asset performance
- Extends asset life and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) at reduced costs and risk
- Integrate maintenance strategy, planning and execution processes and data
- Connect assets with real time condition monitoring, predictive and prescriptive maintenance
- Connect maintenance operations across the enterprise, removing silos in the supply chain
- Adopt new collaborative processes with business partners
- Evolve from reactive asset management to proactive data driven asset performance
One example of Intelligent Asset is of customer which is a Swiss-based globally operating process and laboratory instrumentation and automation supplier company who were looking for a solution for their Process Industry customers to gain more insights into their flowmeters. The wanted to be able to alert their customers and give them the necessary amount of time to react to flowmeter problems. They used SAP Predictive Asset Analytics (Flowmeter), based on SAP IoT Application Enablement to receive following benefits:
- Increased visibility into the states of the pipes by having the right spare parts ordered in advance.
- Fixing the issue is now less time consuming since historical data is in direct access and gives insight to the root cause.
- Increase the overall asset availability for their customers.
- Better insights on the status of the flow meters of their customers. They can advise their customers how to prevent an outage for example by detecting incrustation inside a pipe and the according recommendation to purge the pipe.
- Customer gets notified before an issue occurs at their customers. They can then either instruct customers how to prevent the issue or they can better plan and prepare for maintenance and repair
To summarize the companies which would like to become Intelligent Enterprise applies Industry 4. Now and focusses on these strategic themes. Which then can leverage these innovative technologies, getting a clear view with intelligent data analytics, and creating smart factories, companies can quickly respond to market needs and optimization of operations and portfolios becomes possible.
I hope you all will enjoy reading the above blog post, in case you need any clarification kindly post questions.
In part 3 of my blog post, I will cover next 2 themes for Industry 4.Now: the Empowered People & Connected Consumer

Strategic Themes for Oil Gas and Energy