A future framework for resilient operations

But let's talk...

More recently, when resilience has really reemerged as a new top priority for industrial companies during the COVID era, I think is when it really became number one priority.

And it only seems like it's gotten more important since then.

How has today's geopolitical and operational environment really further reshaped the way energy companies in particular think about efficiency versus resilience and other technologies? competing priorities so yeah

yeah no Keith that's a that's a very important question and in all my global travels in the last I would say three months resiliency is one word that I've been hearing a lot from almost every customer Whether I'm in the Middle East, I'm in Asia Pacific, Australia, China, or even in Europe, and believe it or not, up north in Canada as well.

And I would say there are three factors that are driving it.

You know, COVID was like a once in a lifetime shock that came through.

But I would say COVID was still very predictable.

You knew... that things are going to be shut down demand is going to be lower so you need to operate at xyz capacity yeah right so i would say that while there was a lot of unknowns and uncertainty from a health perspective yeah but from a predictability perspective it was fairly predictable on how you want to run your operations when covid happened yeah right uh and then the recovery after that

yeah

but the world that we are living in today you know we have got a lot of you know Quick policy changes that happen, quicker geopolitical events which are unpredictable.

And that is impacting a lot of the supply chains.

So recently we have seen the conflict in the Middle East.

It's not something that impacts just the Middle East.

So it's impacting Asia Pacific, who used to get their crude oil supplies from that region.

And now they have to pivot towards getting their supplies from somewhere else.

For example, now we are seeing a lot of American cargos going from Latin American cargos or African cargos going to Asia.

And similarly, even Europe had to pivot.

But a lot of these assets are not designed to handle this complexity and variety of crews or feedstocks coming from different places.

So how do you then decide on how you're going to run your operations? So I come from the software world.

So I look at all the level three and four software that sits on top of a control system.

And the primary purpose of those softwares is optimization, is efficiency, is reliability, is uptime, and flexibility of operations.

And so you feel like you're in a world where you're seeing, hey, where am I going to get my feedstock from? How much inventory should I be carrying? Should I take a shutdown earlier than planned? Or the prices are too high, so I want to run at the max capacity, etc.

So I think by resiliency, what I'm finding is if planning cycles were three months or one month, the planning and optimization cycles and requirements have now turned to, can I do this every shift? So that's a big shift that's happening so people want to be prepared for it.

The second thing that we are seeing is a lot of the cyber events or even physical harm to assets.