Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

150 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om P ROF I L ED : P E T RONA S The power of predictive analytics Multinational oil and gas company PETRONAS saved $17.4 million in just 12 months after deploying AVEVA Predictive Analytics in the Microsoft Azure cloud to accurately predict and resolve equipment failures before they happen H eadquartered in Malaysia, Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS) is a multinational oil and gas company that produces 2.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. The organisation aims to achieve net- zero carbon emissions by 2050 but to help it move closer to attaining this sustainability goal, it needed to find a way to optimise the perfor- mance of its plant equipment to make it more reliable and stable. Like any industrial organisation that operates machinery, PETRONAS must ensure its equip- ment runs smoothly at all times to be able to serve customers. Although PETRONAS was able to schedule maintenance activities in advance, it faced unexpected critical rotary equipment failures that can result in unplanned downtime, potentially shutting down an entire plant and leading to catastrophic consequences. PETRONAS’s plants were at risk of critical equipment failure because the engineering divi- sion did not have access to the right information to gain advance warning of problems. Keen to optimise the performance of equipment to improve plant reliability and reduce the risk of downtime, the engineering division wanted to implement an asset performance management (APM) solution. This would give plant operators an insight into impending equipment failures and empower them to proactively fix the equip- ment before bigger problems ensued. Consequently, PETRONAS opted for AVEVA Predictive Analytics, an APM solution that pro- vides early warnings and diagnoses of issues with