Standardizing innovation via a traceable process results in a profitable, time-saving servitization business model

Innovating 3 km below on the ocean floor

Supplying subsea solutions for the oil and gas industry is a zero-error, risk-adverse business. Due to this, how do you lead and innovate in a world where your customers do not dare?

For Optime Subsea, a self-named “innovation disrupter” in the subsea oil and gas industry, their systems and solutions are installed and operate 3 kilometers (km) underwater on the ocean floor.

This Norwegian company specializes in inventing and delivering bespoke systems and systems-as-a-service as solutions for well intervention over the life-of-field, from well completion to plugging and abandonment (P&A). Their systems and services solutions can be found on the major offshore oil and gas fields from the Norwegian continental shelf to the Gulf of Mexico and the deep waters off the coast of Nigeria.

One way Optime Subsea stands out from the competition is that the company standardized innovation, resulting in top-performing, risk-controlled, field-proven products, such as the Electrical Subsea Controls Intervention Light System (eSCILS) and the Remote Operated Completion System (ROCS).

“There’s a faction of customers in the oil and gas industry that understand innovation is a way for them to succeed,” says John Pastor, vice president (VP) enterprise architecture at Optime Subsea. “But innovation is risky, and all of them are a little hesitant to take on risk because the consequences can be catastrophic.”

Image courtesy of Optime Subsea.

Standardizing innovation to reduce risks

Taking the risk factor out of the process for their customers is how Optime Subsea came up with the idea to tandardize innovation. Additionally, their journey with Siemens Digital Industries Software started when they decided to make innovation systematic and safe for the industry.

For this, Optime Subsea uses Siemens product lifecycle management (PLM) and service lifecycle management (SLM) solutions, namely Teamcenter® software and NX™ software. These solutions are part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

“Standardizing innovation is one of our strengths,” says Pastor. “It is the reason our customers are working with us. We knew we needed to control the risk, and we do this with the Siemens PLM and SLM tools. They give us full visibility into what goes into our product, how it was manufactured, the veracity and integrity of the testing – all this serves to reduce our customers’ risks.”

Besides the standardized innovation, products like eSCILS and ROCS are modular, and Optime Subsea can configure them to a customer’s specific needs, including intervention and control system assemblies with task-specific electronics, software, pumps and control modules.

Image courtesy of Optime Subsea.

Advancing from PLM to SLM

Optime Subsea’s journey with Siemens started with PLM, specifically Teamcenter and NX for 3D design. Their first steps on their digital journey focused on the engineering space, capturing requirements, getting product bill-of-materials (BOM) and the design BOM ready and tracing them through their supply chain.

After successfully implementing the Teamcenter and NX backbone on the design and engineering sides, Pastor and his team started to think about next steps.

“We knew we needed to track every manufacturing record as well,” explains Pastor. “We produce bespoke, serial-number units. Every system is about 80 percent the same and 20 percent variant, and they are big systems, with 10,000 to 20,000 elements in a single bill-of-materials.

“We not only needed to appease our customers’ risk-aversion, but we needed to prove to ourselves that our equipment is safe, fit for use and functionally capable. We need this red thread of record-keeping from the time our customer says, ‘Hey, I need to do this,’ to the time that we did it on the ocean floor, three kilometers down in the harshest of conditions, where failure is not an option.”

Image courtesy of Optime Subsea.

Starting the servitization journey

With their red thread of Siemens PLM tools firmly in place, this team of innovators turned to their next big idea: servitization and Teamcenter SLM tools.

This was a radical change from the typical business model in Optime Subsea’s sector, which is engineering, procurement and construction (EPC), but they knew that was not the direction they were taking the company. Their idea was to practice servitization as an innovative business model in the industry.

“Our servitization journey is a very interesting one,” says Pastor. “We knew we wanted to redo or rethink services for the sector. We wanted to have a fleet of our own products. We wanted to own those assets, put them in service operation to do well access operations on the ocean floor, charge for that and deploy our service personnel on those missions.”

To do this, Optime Subsea added Teamcenter SLM and its integrated service BOM (sBOM) to their already detailed PLM digital thread. With this solution, Optime Subsea can directly link every change and action when it comes to bespoke product development, operation, maintenance and other service actions. They would easily be able to reuse, recycle and reference every aspect of their in-development and in-service products to deliver bespoke, mission-critical, risk-controlled systems as a service to their customers.

Image courtesy of Optime Subsea.

Leveraging a new business model and revenue generator

Today, this servitization business model is in place at Optime Subsea. Even as a service, the core product stays 80 percent the same and 20 percent is customized according to the customer’s precise needs. Additionally, just like you might full-service lease a car, Optime Subsea full-service leases subsea oil and gas equipment as well as the operational expertise to install and maintain it.

“Using the Teamcenter SLM solutions gives us a platform to reengineer our product in months,” says Pastor. “Our competitors need to start from the ground up, and they’ll take a half of a year or two years. So, while they’re still trying to get their shoes on, we’ve done five missions.”

Image courtesy of CLEVR.

Achieving faster and safer time-to-market

Of course, being lightyears ahead of the competition with a highly traceable and risk-controlled yet still bespoke product and expert service is a revenue generator.

“We have both sides of the coin here,” says Pastor. “We can reduce costs and increase our margins, but we can really kick up the revenue and get a lot more customer contact points from the time we’re doing concept engineering to the time we’re doing service. And we get valuable feedback during service steps.”

Image courtesy of CLEVR.

Keeping the innovation loop moving forward

From this close customer interaction, the team knows what to improve on its next mission. They can also tag this information in the Teamcenter SLM digital twin and therefore simultaneously in the master product design digital twin in NX software for future reengineering and problem-solving. This is especially important when it comes to the bespoke servitization business model Optime Subsea uses.

“When we bring something back for service and maintenance, we don’t have a typical ABCD list of things-to-do to maintain and refurbish a product,” says Pastor. “Ours is much more ad hoc, more agile and more dependent on experts.

“With Siemens SLM solutions, we keep record of what we did so that if there is a root cause that comes up later, we can trace back to it. Root causes can be very persistent and costly. Keeping track and having a correlation between events can help us move and resolve problems quicker.

“It’s not the case that you’ll never come across problems in business or in life. It has to do with how quickly you can resolve them and how quickly you can leverage them into an opportunity and move forward. Leveraging the Teamcenter SLM platform from that kind of esoteric state gives us this opportunity.

“Using Teamcenter SLM tools has become a bigger part of our business success story. We’re banking on it to give us a closer relationship with our customers in the future.”

Image courtesy of Optime Subsea.

Image courtesy of Optime Subsea.