For Peter Westerink, Shell's general manager of digitalization for downstream manufacturing, it's exciting to talk about industrial digitalization. To explain why, he recalled the 2010 launch of Apple's iPhone 4.
"The slogan Steve Jobs used for that was 'This changes everything -- again,'" Westerink noted. "That captures the essence of digital transformation."
Westerink highlighted several social factors that, along with global competition, continue to drive digitalization. "Energy demand is going to double in the next three decades, people are going to move to cities more and more, and urbanization will transform the way we operate our cities," he said at the TEC Next Conference held recently in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "And on top of that, you can add the constraints we see with carbon emissions.
"How do we respond to that as an energy industry? What are the new developments that we have to come up with in order to solve this ever-more-complex system? Digitalization and energy transition are arguably the two biggest trends or disruptors we see today in our industry."
Why is that? "Well, obviously we see consumer patterns change, and electrification is very big," Westerink said, noting he had spotted several electric fueling stations even during his short visit to Louisiana. "This is real. This is coming, and it's coming everywhere.
"So consumer behaviors, the demographics, what young people expect when they enter a career -- all these things are changing. And of course, within the data environment, we see a massive change in the cost and the ability for us to store, collect, and process data and to grow insights from that."
Westerink characterized data processing as a fraction of the cost and several times the speed today as it was 10 years ago. "That's the backdrop against which we have to drive digital transformation," he said. "But what's inspiring to me are some of the design principles behind [Shell's] digital strategy: Building in-house capability is one of the key things we have to do as an industry to be able to leverage all the computing power and the data science capability that's out there. The other thing that's key is data. Data's the new oil. The data that flows through our systems is what's going to help us unlock a lot of new value."
Finally, Westerink hailed an attitude of "acting our way into the future" as the third key to Shell's digitalization strategy. "Now, this makes a lot of people at Shell very uncomfortable," he admitted. "We like to have a plan. We like to know upfront what we're going to do and then go in a straight line to our goal.
"It doesn't work like that in digitalization. It's [about] frontiersmanship in an industry like this. You can make as many plans as you want, but they won't be the straight lines we're used to when we start up new, big capital projects. So, being able to respond to the changes in the ecosystem around us, think experimentally about how we approach them, and engage in new, maybe unusual partnerships is a way we as a company believe we'll be able to win this transformation."
Cultural change, then, is part and parcel of Shell's digitalization strategy, Westerink noted. "Here in Louisiana, our Convent refinery, for example, is starting what we call a 'hack-a-thon,' where we get a group of data engineers and data scientists together with the domain experts -- a new, unusual mix of people -- and we just put them in a pressure cooker for a week and see what brilliant ideas they come up with," he said. "Of course it's great if something's ⦠discovered, but the real driver behind these hack-a-thons is to start unlocking people's thinking and expose them to a different way to operate our assets, thereby changing the culture."