With over 50 years of experience in innovation, AVEVA has spread its solutions to various industries to empower people and industries and enable their success through digital transformation. Energy Review MENA was able to secure an exclusive interview with Mohamad Awad, Regional VP, MENA & Pakistan of AVEVA to talk about how they’re working to achieve digitization in the energy sector.
What are the services or solutions provided by AVEVA to the MENA region?
AVEVA is an industrial software solutions company that provides solutions all the way from engineering to operations. One of the key changes that happened for us as a company in the last year and a half was that Schneider electric has acquired 60% of AVEVA and merged the Schneider Electric software business into our company. So we have grown now to 4400 people. Because of this, we are now offering solutions across the whole life cycle of an asset from engineering all the way to operations.
In engineering, we provide solutions such as the digital twin technology which is also included in the operations side. The latter consists of different activities mainly maintenance asset management solutions, monitoring and control, and planning and production. So, we believe that AVEVA’s digital twin is a great project and should be implemented across operations as well.
What is AVEVA’s strategy to support oil and gas customers’ digital transformation goals in MENA?
As a start, all our customers are adopting digital transformation initiatives. They have realized the value of what our digitization can bring organizations like themselves. They want to be able to execute projects faster in order to deliver them on time, as well as to reduce the projects’ costs. As AVEVA, we are providing solutions to support our customers in those engagements in order for them to be able to achieve quick wins in this digital transformation story.
On the other side, a lot of customers have a lot of operating assets, and today in order for us to take advantage of these digital transformation initiatives, we need to show clients that they need to first digitize their asset. So, as AVEVA, we take our customers through a pragmatic approach of actually digitizing their asset and all the existing assets which allows them to make use of that data in operations.
From your personal point of view, how do you describe the energy sector in MENA region from a technological perspective?
It's quite similar to what we do with the strategy we provide. We know that the market is changing and focused on the idea of doing more with less. So being able to use technology to help customers achieve more with what they have is very important. But another thing that is also very important is to focus on the people. When we look at today’s energy sector, we notice a lot of millennials joining the industry. What graduates are looking for in the company they’re going to work in is whether it is using the latest technology. So companies have to cater for those young engineers that are coming into the workforce today. This fact is driving a lot of initiatives within the energy sector and within companies to look at ways of improving their processes and their technology. This is where we can help as AVEVA as well because we provide solutions related to VR, AR, touchscreen technology to access information, etc.
What are your goals and projects for 2020? Are your planning on expanding your operations?
In terms of 2020 goals, we will be focusing a lot on the Middle East and North Africa region. We are growing our team not only in Dubai but also in other parts of MENA. That shows that the company is investing heavily in the region. Our customers always wish to be at the forefront of any new technology solution, so hence investing in the region and working with our customers and partners is very important.
We are expanding a lot in this industry. AVEVA is not just limited to oil and gas; we actually cater for all kinds of different markets like chemicals to food and beverages, power and utilities, infrastructure…etc. So we see that there is a good opportunity for us to continue expanding in this region because there's a lot of new digital projects and a lot of initiatives in all of these different types of industries.
Among our customers here in the region are Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC, Kuwait Oil Company, and Aramco for oil and gas. We deal as well with contractors like NPCC and Lamprell. All of these companies are actually implementing a digital transformation initiative. They all want the same thing which is to know what they still don’t and they wish to be able to retrieve the information they want every time from one location. This is why one of our key projects in this region was Panorama for ADNOC and as you could see, it's one of our flagship product where we have connected many of their operating companies so they will be able to visualize information all in one place. The main reason why they did that was again to have a single version of the truth. In addition, one of our key offering is the Unified Operations Center which locates all plant operations and planning in a single-center to increases operational agility
So, when we talk to contractors, operators, or shipbuilders, they all want the same thing which is a single version of the truth. And at AVEVA, we have a very open platform that allows us to capture information from those different industries.
At the end of the day, it’s a journey. One of the key aspects for our customers which we are very proud of is that we haven’t left one customer unhappy. We’ve always delivered solutions and we’ve always considered our customers as trusted partners rather than a customer.
One of the things to highlight, considered as the added-value of AVEVA, is that we understand the industry. We bring our solutions to the industry thanks to people who are actually from the industry and have the appropriate background. So we’re providing the solutions with the right subject-matter experts for our customers.
