Tom Quinn, who joined Broadspectrum from Jacobs Engineering in October as its new resources chief, told the APPEA 2017 dinner on Tuesday night that the company's high-tech innovation extended beyond the record-breaking turnarounds achieved with its ‘Ultralight' rig in Queensland.
Broadspectrum has been boosted since its takeover last June by Spanish diversified multinational Ferrovial, one of the world's leading infrastructure companies which boasts 96,000 employees in more than 26 countries, $15 billion in revenue with the capacity to build, own and operate assets.
Among other things, the big win emerging from that takeover was Broadspectrum joining Ferrovial's centres of excellence, with the Spanish company starting up a resources arm of the centre run by Quinn and Tim Phelan, who is executive general manager - well servicing of subsidiary Easternwell.
Quinn said joining Ferrovial's centre of excellence network allowed Broadspectrum to offer unique benefits to its customers - both in the CSG space in Queensland and for others in the west like Woodside Petroleum - with solutions that are sustainable, innovative and lower cost.
In the process, Broadspectrum is drawing on the network's knowledge base of more than 3000 people globally.
The centres will help Broadspectrum's work in Australia, which includes being Woodside Petroleum's offshore maintenance contractor for 20 years on the North West Shelf.
"These ideas are about creating opportunities and developing solutions for leveraging knowhow, in-house tech capabilities, global ecosystems, collaborative programs and proprietary solutions," Quinn said.
"Examples are our data driven management in programs like Energy R'US which uses gamification to lower energy consumption. Our online data integration platform allows us to access predictive analytics to consider whole of life asset ownership for capital projects.
"Artificial intelligence and robotics, broad learning processes and simplifying service operations gives new technologies and enables us to use older technologies in better ways."
Energy R'US is an initiative from Ferrovial's centres of excellence to increase energy efficiency in buildings through gamification.
The objective is to motivate users to increase energy savings using game design elements and game principles in a non-game context.
Building users can observe the influence of their actions on the building's energy performance in a playful, personalised and sustainable way.
Broadspectrum's workwear is also equipped with environmental sensors to measure the workers' exposure to physical dangers such as noise and UV radiation, which helps protect people in the field.
The Ferrovial move gave broader scope to the local experience gained in working for some 40 years in maintenance, shutdowns and brownfield projects in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.
"Led by Tim Phelan, the Centre of Excellence for Resources will harness our best practice for the oil and gas, mining and industrial sectors providing new capabilities and solutions to increase productivity and lower business costs," Quinn said.
"We have the largest and most productive workover rigs in Queensland's CSG industry that are reducing gas-to-gas timelines by up to 30%. We are using asset data analytics and workflow diagnostics to reduce maintenance costs by up to 45%."
The company is also reducing overall shutdown costs by 20%.
He said the company had delivered those changes through a diverse, inclusive, engaged workforce, evidenced by high local and indigenous content and pursuit of "aggressive modernisation" of its employment agreements.
