In the West, process engineering companies have typically
benefited from the ability to access experienced talent in the form
of operators, control/process engineers and general IT staff. Much
of this talent is aging and retiring from the industry and there is
a shortage of staff with sufficient skills to replace these
employees,writes John Taylor, vice-president EMEA,
business consulting and sales operations atAspenTech
.
With pressure from the market and companies looking at
rationalising assets, this position is likely to worsen still
further - in the short term at least.
The problem is particularly acute in the oil, gas and
petrochemical industries. According to The Society of Petroleum
Engineers, the average age of a petroleum worker is 51 years old.
Nearly 60% are 45 or older. This represents a significant peak in
the profile of existing workers and suggests that around 40% of the
workforce will be lost over the next ten years
These skills are currently not being replaced. According to
Shell Global Solutions, US colleges produced fewer than 200,000
technically based graduates to replace the two million experienced
professionals who retired between 1998 and 2008. And similar
problems exist across the EMEA region, where students are
increasingly choosing to pursue business focused rather than
technology focused degrees and careers.
Knowledge transfer is key
We are already feeling the effects of these problems. As a
result, there is an increasing reliance on automation and
intelligent systems to boost workforce productivity. The key
requirement is the ability to facilitate knowledge transfer.
Organisations need solutions that are capable of capturing all of
the salient points about a facility in one place and at the same
time, and by so doing help to drive their workflow efficiencies,
improve their productivity levels and enhance their predictive
capabilities.
The challenge for software technology vendors in the space is to
work with customers to find ways that technology can be used to
build efficiencies in the processes undertaken by engineers and
make the programmes intuitive so that less skilled operators are
able to use them.
Continuity is critical here. The first question engineers
typically ask when carrying out a new study of an existing process
is: "Do we have a previous model for this?" They are above all
looking for software tools that will allow them to quickly and
easily optimise the efficient operation of the process in
question.
Putting a structure in place
If inexperienced engineers have to sift through a vast quantity
of documentation from a broad range of unconnected sources, they
will inevitably find the whole process time-consuming and
frustrating. It will also be almost impossible to verify the
accuracy and the reliability of the source and avoid interpretation
errors.
Instead, they need to seek out process optimisation solutions
that enable them to obtain a much more structured information set.
In this way, they can have the reassurance of knowing that the data
has already been sorted and classified making it much easier to
find information and giving the user confidence that his or her
understanding of the data is consistent with that of the person who
originally put it into the system.
The great benefit of such an approach is that the only prior
knowledge users need is an understanding of how to use the software
itself. In other words, it represents an extremely effective means
of optimising knowledge transfer from one generation of engineers
to the next.
Today's process engineering landscape is changing rapidly. With
many organisations no longer able to draw on the skills and
expertise of highly experienced operators, automated knowledge
transfer solutions that effectively close the skills gap and
deliver a potent combination of rich functionality and ease of use
are likely to become ever more popular.