Tim Bisley is Senior VP at Lloyd’s Register and he provides some cases of how automation is impacting upon jobs in engineering, asset management and risk management. He also expands upon how digitalisation can combat aging workforce and for bridging the skills gap. The focus is primarily on the energy sector.
Digital Journal: What are the main challenges facing energy?
Tim Bisley: In the energy sector, the looming ‘great crew change’ is a considerable source of anxiety. It’s becoming more difficult than ever for companies to retain critical knowledge and experience within their organisational memory. And in high-risk sectors such as the marine and oil and gas industries, knowledge is fundamental to safety and reliability.
Knowledge is the difference between profitable operations and unreliable equipment at risk of failure from factors such as corrosion, human error, and fluctuating operating conditions.
DJ: How can automation help to address these challenges?
Bisley: The new generation of asset performance management software utilises automation that ultimately addresses the issues and challenges posed by an ageing workforce. Automation is quite a wide spectrum of things. It can be automation of process e.g. doing something in a tool rather than manually. It can mean automation of the workflow e.g. bringing business processes together and moving data between them. It can mean the automatic import of data into the tools that would otherwise need to be done manually. It can mean automated insight (this is where it becomes a little more qualitative). Each of these ways of automatically capturing data, process and insight helps the industry to move through the great new change.
DJ: What advantages can be drawn from digital technology?
Bisley: In the asset management space, digitising expert knowledge and best practices enables engineers to map their understanding of failure mechanisms and failure causes and then sense-check their model against a rich library of information. This can then be codified and added to the solution, enabling a systematic approach to capturing human knowledge and best practices, all in one place and accessible across the organisation. But this type of approach isn’t just confined to engineers and asset managers, it’s the type of process that could be rolled out in all sorts of jobs and industries.
DJ: Will such technologies result in its of job losses?
Bisley: Engineers will always be needed to maintain equipment, but we expect that they’ll increasingly require a different set of skills to run and optimise the assets of tomorrow. Equally, software like AllAssets is geared towards accentuating workers’ knowledge and experience rather than replacing it.
DJ: Do workers need to learn new skills to engage with new technology?
Bisley: There is a fundamental shift in how things are designed, built, installed, maintained and operated. As a result, programming, cyber security, data science and analytical skills will all become far more prominent and the workforce will need to adapt.
DJ: Can technology help to address skills gaps?
Bisley: In part, yes. Comprehensive knowledge transfer between the retiring generation, and the new influx of workers is essential. Without a plan in place the loss of knowledge capital is very real. By using technology to digitalise those years and years of knowledge and experiences, companies can go some way to addressing the potential risk of retirement, or even staff changes due to mergers and acquisitions.
