May-2022

Accelerating the digital transformation

The energy and utilities (E&U) industry constantly changes and transforms to comply with government regulations, implement new technologies, and satisfy customer demands.

Siemens Digital Industries Software

Article Summary

To improve profitability in this very competitive and volatile market, energy companies must reinvent and innovate their business models to create new revenue streams and reduce risk. These shifts will necessitate more streamlined engineering and development processes providing seamless collaboration across teams.

One of the biggest challenges many energy companies face is completing their projects on time and within budget. The lack of complete organizational structures and discipline-specific tools create miscommunication, misaligned objectives, and data-sharing with no real standards. This often creates confusion and constant error correction that can negatively impact project costs and schedules, leading to project cancellations.

Climate change is turning "clean energy" into a big deal, and the demand for alternative energy sources is poised to increase rapidly in the next few years. Since sustainable energy has been proven to create and boost shareholder value, this trend will mandate companies to find new energy sources and technologies and smarter infrastructure as quickly as possible.

Finally, the time is ripe for digital transformation in the energy industry. The recent pandemic has given a much-needed boost for companies to accelerate their digitalization plans. Advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT), are crucial to making accurate forecasts, respond intelligently to power consumption, and create a climate-friendly energy system.

While these changing trends are exciting for the industry, they also create a new level of complexity that can make innovation more challenging for energy companies. For example, how well do your teams manage data? Is the data readily accessible to all stakeholders to make informed decisions during the development cycle? Efficient innovation processes require adopting a holistic approach and ensures tighter integration across engineering disciplines, including mechanical, software and electrical teams.

What if all your engineering teams could work together to develop a virtual design model that simulates how assets and systems will be used in the future? A model-based systems engineering (MBSE) methodology can make this possible.
- Conquer complexity with MBSE
- Get your engineering and operations teams together
- Model-based systems engineering

Successfully address the complexities of project execution by moving away from a document-based to a model-based systems approach that integrates operational requirements from various disciplines to improve internal work processes and communication.

Comprehensive digital twin
Unify the entire lifecycle of a project using a comprehensive digital twin and a single digital thread that forms the backbone of an enterprise. Its configurable design manages and represents a fully traceable network of interactions that can identify probable and high impact program failures early on so that they can be resolved before they evolve into bigger problems.

Unify the entire lifecycle of a project using a comprehensive digital twin and a single digital thread that forms the backbone of an enterprise. Its configurable design manages and represents a fully traceable network of interactions that can identify probable and high impact program failures early on so that they can be resolved before they evolve into bigger problems.

Multi-domain or multi-level approach  
Apply a model-based systems architecture to structure project requirements across all key disciplines. System process capabilities and limitations are supported by methods and tools that enable and enhance multi-domain and multi-level interactions across the different work teams using interactive models in graphical form. By using MBSE, engineering teams can streamline information and communication to efficiently analyze and fulfill project requirements.

Performance monitoring
Use templates and predefined interfaces to configure and control information. In addition, engineering teams can integrate and verify all information for greater visibility and collaboration across key disciplines to ultimately reduce project risks.
- Model-based vs document-based
- Create timelines to avoid schedule delays and program cancellations
- Identify resource usage to avoid cost overruns
- Reduce risk management by introducing fewer errors in the early requirements phase
- Capture and streamline just the right amount of information and minimize manual transcriptions of concepts

A siloed approach won’t win in the digital economy. Model-based systems engineering can help energy businesses to integrate and manage system requirements throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Make the digital enterprise a reality
Digital transformation doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with integrating your engineering teams with the Siemens model-based systems engineering approach.

Adopting MBSE will allow the key disciplines of your organization to fully connect and coordinate their teams to promote collaboration and achieve increased productivity and efficient work processes.

The Siemens MBSE approach offers a comprehensive digital solution to help your company manage data that spans your engineering, manufacturing, operations, and maintenance activities. It helps your teams orchestrate their projects and programs to coordinate interrelated technical scopes, from conceptual design through development to maximize overall awareness and efficiency.

Furthermore, the solution is built on an open ecosystem, which means you can accommodate a variety of tools for requirements and systems modeling.  

Key benefits
- Capture and store information from critical disciplines to be visualized in interactive diagrams.
- Use interactive models in a simple graphical form throughout all stages of the project, including design and maintenance
- Use customizable digital twin to modularize sub-model and sub-systems across key disciplines.
- Coordinate operational requirements across all stakeholder teams.
- Optimize project costs, fulfill project schedule, and improve project performance.

Our solutions help companies in the energy and utility industry to accelerate their ability to optimize and innovate by learning how to apply their physical and digital assets to deliver top performance across all categories.