Enterprises in hazardous industries, such as those in oil and gas, oil and gas, chemical, energy and industry manufacturing intuitively know that digital transformation is essential to their achieving operational excellence across the business. However, the newly released Operational Excellence Index report shows that most organizations in these industries are still in the most formative stages of digitization.
According to the survey, 90 percent of organizations in hazardous industries agreed that digital transformation will accelerate their ability to achieve operational excellence–in other words not just making moment-in-time improvements, but to gain continuous and sustainable improvements in the way they achieve gains on business objectives. That’s up considerably from last year when 73 percent of leaders said the same.
Respondents demonstrated that a big part of the way that digital transformation will improve operational excellence has to do with the insights it will afford their businesses. This corroborates individual anecdotes seen across the industry, such is how BP is taking a stake in AI to help it better analyze subsurface assets in order to accelerate project life cycles, from exploration through to reservoir modeling. According to the Operational Excellence Index, 75 percent of executives in hazardous industries say it will create new, insight-driven business processes across various functions. Additionally, 55 percent reported technology is helping them to reduce operational risk and 55 percent say they’re using it to improve asset availability and uptime.
Still, most respondents have a long way to go in their digital transformation efforts. More than half of respondents said that they don’t yet grasp what digital transformation means specifically to their organization and 69 percent are at the early stages of transformation.
Finally, while three in four respondents are aware that to succeed in any sustainable transformation they need to build data-driven processes that cross enterprise functions, 83 percent of respondents said that they are still using legacy systems to try to improve business agility.
