Situation
Operating in 11 countries across four continents requires considerable coordination and asset management, particularly for an integrated utilities and energy group. An Abu Dhabi-based leader had a broad portfolio spanning power and water generation, transmission and distribution assets, and upstream and midstream oil and gas operations. While building these expansive capabilities, the company had developed disparate business processes and deployed diverse technologies. Standardizing its processes and embracing the cloud could help eliminate complexities and reduce its reliance on an on-premise design that was incurring a high total cost of ownership (TCO) and struggling to realize the value from the company’s huge repository of unstructured data.
Collaboration
Wipro worked with the energy company to prioritize the Netherlands and UK as prime candidates for process standardization and automation. Based on multiple workshops, Wipro recommended IBM Maximo’s integrated asset-management solution to facilitate the management of assets, materials, supply chains and work across both regions. The solution replaced the majority of customizations with configurations to simplify the existing system. Wipro also implemented several interfaces and technology upgrades to improve the business process and enhance the user experience.
After cleansing and editing the data, Wipro migrated 50 million records from Maximo 7.1 to the latest Maximo 7.6 with the “Oil and Gas” industry solution add-on. Wipro also migrated the existing on-premise EAM instance to Azure Cloud, automating manual processes with DevOps for continuous deployment.
Outcomes
The unified solution provided an integrated and single source of data that enabled the energy company to share knowledge and resources between the two regions. The solution has provided traceability and control of their huge asset repository, helping them to make faster decisions with optimum efficiency.
In addition, where the multinational enterprise had previously used Oracle, Wipro migrated the relevant databases to SQL Server to leverage the energy leader’s Microsoft subscriptions and save licensing costs. This, combined with the decision to host Maximo on Azure Cloud, saved significant hardware, software, and long-term infrastructure cost for the company.
By leveraging the cloud, the solution also positioned the energy leader to implement mobility and IoT technologies in the future to meet the needs of an evolving market while positioning them ahead of the competition in terms of EAM maturity.