Oil & gas players join forces to scale up energy industry’s digital inventory ecosystem

Five oil and gas companies – ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies and Vår Energi – have inked an industry collaboration agreement to pool resources in a bid to standardise the digital supply of spare parts, setting an industry standard for a digital inventory ecosystem.

ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies and Vår Energi, together with the software company Fieldnode, have set out to develop a digital foundation to build a network for the supply of spare parts produced on demand through additive manufacturing technology.

The two-year agreement’s goal is to scale up the digital ecosystem to drastically reduce lead times, physical inventories, the total cost of ownership, and materials waste, while reducing shipping distances, and improving the overall environmental impact, efficiency, and security of the supply chain.

While the technology to achieve these benefits is available, the partners see it necessary to establish a fit-for-purpose standard process to really scale this and utilise the technology and transact in the new ecosystem. Therefore, the oil and gas companies entered into this collaboration to solve the existing challenges, expecting this to enable the whole energy sector to reap the benefits.

Furthermore, some of the areas that are set out to be addressed in the collaboration project cover the standardisation around qualification processes, a new commercial model that caters for mass customisation and improved total cost of ownership for customers vs. traditional volume-based incentives.

Fieldnode highlights that the partners plan to progressively invite their current suppliers, independent additive manufacturers as well as other suppliers to collaborate on the platform throughout the two years to ensure the whole industry can benefit from this transformation. This approach will enable the partners to test the technical and commercial solutions and fill the digital inventory with content.

Moreover, the foundational technical solution is said to be the Fieldnode platform, which was developed through a joint industry project with Fieldnode, Equinor and TotalEnergies. This platform facilitates “efficient and resilient” operation of supply networks to support the oil and gas operators in sharing limited supply chain resources, underlines Fieldnode.

“The collaboration agreement gives the opportunity to further develop needed industry standards to scale this and thereby secure supply of spare parts and at the same time reduce the environmental footprint,” concluded Fieldnode.