Rockwell Automation's Chairman & CEO, Blake Moret - Oil and Gas Leaders magazine, Sep2019

The benefits of convergence
Wireless technology,
visualization software and
other advances now allow oil
and gas companies to access
and monitor assets in real
time, and merge disparate
oilfield data into streams of
actionable information –
anywhere, anytime. As the
benefits from the convergence
of automation,
communications and
information technology
multiply, oil and gas
companies are now truly
heading towards digital
oilfields.
“In addition to providing more
secure connections to the data
— bringing the silos of information
together — our
ConnectedProduction
approach provides a suite of
oil-and-gas applications and
tools that allow managers and
producers to gain operational
insights into their operations,”
says Moret. “This includes
production and operation
workflows, automation of
manual processes and
role-based visualization, so
the right stakeholder sees the
right information based on
that person’s function. It also
connects to advanced analytic
platforms, allowing operations
to gain valuable insights into
the process.”
Intelligent assets – from data to
decision making
While high-integrity data is the
foundation of the digital
transformation journey, data
on its own means nothing. “We
combine and unlock the data
with competent
decision-making to expand
what is possible, helping to
make our customers more
connected, productive,
intelligent and ultimately,
competitive,” says Moret.
A key concept of
ConnectedProduction is the
idea of intelligent assets.
“Intelligent assets are a way to
group together software and
hardware components in the
field and provide automatic
configuration,” Moret elaborates.
“An example would be
a well-pump controller. The
ability to automatically connect
to an asset, give it context and
then automatically generate
dashboards, workflows and
analytics hugely reduces the
number of skill sets needed to
configure that asset. The
historian, visualization and
program are all done
automatically by the system.”
Moret describes how a
customer, through
assessment and analysis, had
developed an array of
manual processes that
involved sending engineers to
the field to collect data from
well pads, before coalescing
the data into spreadsheets for
analysis related to the level of
chemical injection needed to
avoid wax buildup, which impacted
production. While the
analysis was valid, it took time,
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