Assets CollABorative October 2023 - Tech Talk with Jørgen Rogde, VP, Asset Management

IFS Assets CollABorative - Tech Talk Session with Jørgen Rogde, VP, Asset Management at IFS

Date of Meeting: 26 October 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Jørgen Rogde Presentation:

Slide: IFS Assets CollABorative

• I’ve got Martin Harris with me today as well. So, he will help me with a bit more into the details on some of the topics that you may ask questions about, so we'll cover topics in detail that you're interested in. And obviously as we're quite a few people, feel free to ask questions as we go along. The plan is to first of all, do a recap of what we did release in 23R1 earlier this year, and then talk about what's coming now in 23R2. What we're currently planning on doing for the next coming release of 24R1 and then what we have a slide on candidate topics as well. I do have a number of backup slides to some of this, so if we end up going through some of these things quickly, then we have some time for discussion, because although you're getting information from me that I see an opportunity to also get information from doing this exercise.

Slide: Confidential

• Statements of possible future functionality for IFS’ software products and Copyright© 2023 by Industrial and Financial Systems, IFS AB.  IFS and all IFS product names are trademarks of IFS. All rights reserved.
• This document may contain statements of possible future functionality for IFS’s software products and technology. Such statements of future functionality are for information purposes only and should not be interpreted as any commitment or representation. This document shall be kept strictly confidential. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the permission of IFS.

Slide: IFS R&D: 7 Stages Development Progress

• I'm speaking for the Asset Management part of our offering, but I'm not really covering the aviation or A&D space on this call specifically.
• I just wanted to point that before I start going into the detail on what we've been up to, I'm talking a bit about our development process because this is where I got an ask right? As part of our development process, we need to do continuous validation that we're doing the right thing and doing it in the right way. And I would really appreciate help on topics that are relevant for you, to have people that we can engage with, and making sure that we as part of the strategy that we define the value propositions that we create that we are solving the right things. That's really part of the Stage 2 section on this slide, and then Stage 3, we go into validating that what we intend to deliver, that we're able to deliver, we remove sufficient certainty before we start development. And then we also need to validate with a number of customers, so that when we start developing something that we know that we will deliver something of value to you and also during the development phase, we are doing constant validations with customers and end users of this. And if you have topics that I'm going to talk about that are of interest to you and you have people that can help us through that validation, we greatly appreciate it. I also appreciate that everybody's got a business to run and all the things to spend time on, but if I can help and get help from you validating this, you will also get toys in your hands at some point that will address the needs that you have as well, because it’s all about making sure I do the right thing in the right way and deliver the value that we set out to achieve.

Slide: Top of mind for Asset Management Leaders

• Martin and I were discussing the top of mind for asset management leaders and we have come up with four items. There are probably others that we could bring up as well, but here are four top notes that we know and discussed quite a lot.
• AI is one of those, and one of the focus that we got is application of artificial intelligence. It's not just providing AI and machine learning because those in itself doesn't provide any value at all. It’s when you apply it in contexts that they actually provide value. Examples where we can apply AI for instance, is to help with data mapping, ingesting data from the various variety of sources and assisting with aligning attributes and data from that perspective. For instance, it could be unlocking knowledge from the data and driving changes as part of making strategies are 2 examples of those, and we have a number of tangible things that we would like to do that I'm going to talk a bit about later.
• Asset Performance Management is also very important. And they're giving us the ability to reduce planned maintenance based on calendar for instance, ensuring up time, reducing the need for doing corrective maintenance, all areas that are very important to everyone and it's an area that is going to have a continued focus within IFS.
• Asset Investment Planning has also been around for some time, but if we can build capabilities, they can help make better and more informed strategic decisions, that is going to mean quite a lot for our customers. We haven't got a lot of asset investment capabilities in the product at the moment, but it's something that we would like to do more in the future.
• And obviously ESG and sustainability is important to everyone. And anything from reporting adherence directly to requirements, managing material passports and understanding which assets can be referred, repaired, refurbished and recycled at the end of the operational life are still quite important elements as part of that and the asset management context.

Slide: A Recap on 23R1

• So moving on, and switching gears a bit and talking about 23R1. I appreciate none of you are within oil and gas, but we had in applications 10 and earlier, we had an oil and gas extension where we now built all the capabilities into the core of our application, so there's no additional add-on from industry perspective. So that's been a significant value addition for many of our customers in that space, enabling them to upgrade to IFS cloud.
• We recently also got the DNV certification as well. I think the paperwork has just been drafted by DNV for us to be able to prove that the authority surveys that they do, where they can log into the system themselves and do the necessary survey, without the need of a new one in our customer site to do that on their behalf is that it says significant benefit for customers in oil and gas.
• And we also done work within asset performance management around asset conditions recording. We used that to identify the health of the assets and feed that into the asset insight and this is fully configurable so it can meet the different processes that our customers have.
• And then we also have the asset insights capability where data about the health of the asset is calculated based on the asset conditions recording and presented in the readily and readable format. This can then be used by reliability engineers.
• We also have a capability what we call maintenance planning and scheduling where we've done further enhancements to this event management and ability to schedule crews and also to exclude certain content from scheduling when you don't need it. So that was some of the things we did for 23R1.

Slide: Example additions and updates in 23R2

• Then moving on to 23R2. For oil and gas we have the ability to have offshore nodes on a rig for instance or on a vessel that can run autonomously without being connected to the onshore and then it replicates the information onshore, from offshore to onshore and onshore to offshore. That was part of the industry extension that we had on apps 10 and earlier that's now built into the core of our product.
• Also, we've done some further enhancement to mobile work order for the asset condition recording because I was developed in 23R1 mainly for the back-office web client, but not available on the mobile device itself. So, this is just making sure that they mobile work order has that information up to date as well.
• Another highlight is introduction of electronic signatures, not to be confused with digital signatures. When you sign off a specific job and you need cryptographic signatures to guarantee that no one has tampered with anything from a database information perspective, this is signing of documents.

Slide: Electronic Signatures with Adobe Sign

• We have as part of this, a joint collaboration with Adobe Sign which enables you to securely send documents for signature directly from IFS Cloud. Any way you use document management today, you will be able to use this capability. Obviously this reduces the handling time for actually getting those type of signatures captured and also store the documents security back into document management. There's been a long-awaited capability by a lot of our customers and hopefully this also interest for you to have embedded within the software rather than managing this outside.

Slide: Planned deprecation in 23R2

• Alright, a couple of things I thought worth mentioning as well and I don't know how we've covered deprecation within IFS in the past. Deprecation means that it's something that we're planning to remove at some point, and it's not removed in the product, but we would not normally sell like capability anymore. There are two things I want to highlight here.
• One is document management. We are planning to remove file shares and FTP storage as storage options in 24R1. So we have a deprecation notice for 23R2 and we have a new storage option called IFS cloud file storage to be used as a replacement. That file storage capability is available both in an on Prem deployment from 23R1 as well as in the Cloud. So, customers that are running in the managed cloud, are not impacted at all on IFS cloud because they already run the IFS cloud file storage by default. FTP and file share are not available at all. That and customers that are running on Prem and IFS cloud deployment and are using either file share or FTP are recommended to move over through the IFS Cloud file storage instead. But it's just an alternative for storage option, right? And there are tools available from moving documents over. So just for your awareness, if you are running a file share or an FTP server for that, that will no longer be needed.
• And the other part is maintenance planning board, which is an old. it It's an old C++ based application which is overdue to be removed and there is a new capability called Maintenance Planning and Scheduling which is addressing that specific need which is the modern version of this. So, with a 23R2, there is a replacement for a for MPB already. And we intend to remove it in 24R1. One exception being for an aviation maintenance or airframe MRO, where there were some capabilities that would need to be added for that, but we don't have a lot of customers using it in that space.

Slide: IFS Acquires P2 Energy Solutions

• Before I start on next investments, I just want to highlight a few things. You may or may not have noticed that IFS acquired a company called P2 Energy Solutions and in October, I think last year it was announced and the press release that went out was mainly focusing on the fact that the market leader in upstream energy and natural resources, so mainly in oil and gas, but what we haven't really spoken about is that they got something called an operational intelligence platform. And that enables us to start to do some quite interesting things. So instead of building a lot of new toys, we can make use of toys that we have acquired. So, this is one out of several acquisitions that we've been doing of interest to us as part of that.

Slide: Currently planned for 24R1

• And moving on to what we're doing, is that going forward for 24R1 we're planning to enhance maintenance planning. Since nobody is using the maintenance planning board itself, we are now improving  what's available in the Web client, from the planning capabilities like the Gantt charts, improving drag and drop capabilities, defaulting dates, improvement through lobbies etcetera and also improving performance. And when you actually want to schedule a maintenance plan, there's the right performance and can you take on the volume, and that’s what some of our customer are talking about because our customers are having significant volumes they want to schedule as part of that.
• One item we're doing in another area that we are working on and this is really a product wide investment that we're doing is to enhance time zone support. So for those of you that actually work across multiple time zones and find time zones cumbersome within IFS, we are trying to address that as a multi release investment, but it will enable you for instance to display content in the time zone that you are sitting in or in the time zone of the asset that you're working with or the engineer or the site that it is relevant to. So, you can then see that there are small indications against the time and date that it's in this time zone. If it's EDT, UTC, or wherever you're sitting as part of that. This is a significant undertaking to do this consistently across the application with the aim is that we should have consistent experience across the whole product. And obviously there is already support of time zones within IFS, it's just that there might be solution specific areas and they might vary. It's not consistent as part of this as well, and in some cases you probably were lacking good times on support.
• The next one is the P2 operational intelligence. The company I mentioned, where we are aiming at building an integration between the operational intelligence capabilities from P2 with IFS Cloud for Asset Management and the initial scope that we're synchronization of the equipment object structure with P2 and making use of the OI which is in the calculation based or rule based anomaly detection capabilities that we are having. So that's something that's undergoing at the moment, and if the proof of concept is there, I'm pushing my team that should deliver tangible value in this area for 24R1. But, let's face it, we acquired a company that builds integration to ERPs in general, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to make use of this already now. But I want to productize and package all of this and make it easy to be used by many of our customers with as little effort as possible.
  For many companies that seek to implement asset performance management, this could be a very interesting tool to connect the various data sources. SCADA Historian, OSIsoft, IoT databases, whatever you have and filter that and turn that into anomalies that can be detected when stuff is outside of parameters, very widely used in a variety of industries, and we find it's very cool.
  And I know P2 has been focusing on oil and gas and energy. There's nothing's oil and gas specific in there, it can be used by anyone. And getting those toys gets me quite excited. Now, apply this directly to our customers businesses where you don't have to do a lot yourself and then that's a really high value item for each of them.
• And then we also doing some other improvements. We are doing some replication enhancements for oil and gas as well because there are some improvements that we would like to do there and will also doing enhancement to our B2B collaboration capabilities. There are some usability improvements that some of our customers been requesting around creating fault reports, making things visible on tasks, etcetera.

Slide: P2 Operational Intelligence Platform – Collaborative Work Environment

• Fundamentally what we're doing with this is we're replicating the threaded object structure we have in IFS Cloud into P2, pointing it at the right data sources, which could be OSIsoft, could be AVEVA, could be anything you like really, it's just a data source to us. It’s censored information getting into the system somehow. Where we do asset condition callings in IFS cloud, we might push those up to P2 if that's relevant, but other than that, it will be that IoT data. Part of the process that’s defined the rules and KPIs around what's called an integrity operating window. So, you set the thresholds, you set the point to which you want to have alerts versus alarms, those kinds of things, and P2 basically just consumes the data, monitors it, looks for those breaches, and then sends back a case message. So for us, the mechanics will be basically the object structure sits inside IFS cloud, it's duplicated, it's kind of a twin inside P2. We look at data coming in streaming through from the IoT sensors, triggering points on that integrity operating window, and then in effect creating a case, which will then get mapped back into IFS Cloud for fault reports or work orders, or the right mechanisms happens to be for that.

Slide: P2 OI Event Processing Example – Equipment Health Monitoring

• And then there's two pieces. There's data visualization that happens inside P2, so you can clearly look at the sensors, stretch the hierarchy, look at the charts, etcetera. And then we are considering how much activation lies inside IFS Cloud as well? And then as you see it here, it's fairly obvious stuff we're doing. It's monitoring data, so you prebuild the hierarchical structure, take the real time feed and speeds at the right frequency, because maybe you don't want real time, but you may want 10 hertz. And then you basically just highlight where the anomalies are, so this is very much a rule based KPI calculation driven along detection tool.

Slide: IFS Acquires Falkonry: Revolutionizing Industry AI

• You may also have noticed in the press release that accquired a company called Falkonry. AND if you think OI is interesting to you, Falkonry gives you the ability for a self learning model. So, you don't define any thresholds, you don't really do very much at all, apart from defining which sensors you want to capture data for. And it does this job for you magically. I always wanted the green button you push once a day and you don't have to do anything else, right?
• So we acquired Falkonry, but it's still not completed. Obviously there is a due diligence process that's ongoing, that it's going to take us towards the end of the year before everything is completed. So, I'm not really allowed to engage with Falkonry yet to level I would like to, but this together with operational intelligence, operation intelligence, you can define KPI and thresholds and those type of things, this doesn't have any thresholds. It provides you with anomalies nevertheless, and then we need to find out how we can actually combine Falkonry with IFS Cloud, Falkonry with OI, if we think that is of interest and all of those three things together, which is really, really exciting. So, if you really want to get quick and up and running on something, Falkonry is the quick approach to it. We don't have to have to define much at all. Whilst OI there is more effort to it. And we obviously need to work with the customers to identify what the overall value proposition for them is so we can make sure that when we productize and package all of this into an offering, that it fits what our customers need.

Slide: Candidates for future releases under consideration

• Candidates for future releases currently under consideration, we are actively working on a number of these things to not only define the requirement, define the solution, we would implement them, do the validation to stage three parts of this that I mentioned before. So, we want to provide an enhanced work safety capability covering a lot more of the HSE processes than what's available in the software today and we want to enhance our GIS offering. We have basic capabilities in that space, but would like to significantly enhance that, so improve the import of GIS and EAM assets from maps options to group base maps and read only layers, display overlay work orders and resources via the Web client. There are lots of things that we would like to do as part of that.
• Asset Performance Management, we are looking at anomaly detection as part of this, we're doing some of our work already, but we haven't got all the toys in. I don't know when they will be able to package this properly, but even today, you could buy Falkonry and plug that in because it does what it needs to do already today, but what I want to do, is package as much as possible so that when we go to market with this package there is very little effort on your part in order to get up and running and get value out of it. It’s the application of AI that we're after here, right? Because if I just give you the technology and you just figure out, you may not get off the ground at all with it.
• We want to build a fully integrated FMECA capability, so that it supports RCM. So that we can combine it with AI, provide a significant improved capabilities in this area. We want to extend APM beyond that with P2 and provide time series forecasting and prediction of health as part of it. And the fun thing about this is that with the toys that we bought and the investment we're doing, some of the things that we thought would take a long time for us to deliver on, becomes a lot nearer to us.
• And we're also looking at extending the on the capabilities we released in 23R1 around asset insights to give you a cockpit of assets health by adding more indication parameters, cost, meantime between failure, meantime to repair, etcetera.
• This may not be of interested to you, around compatible units and FERC reporting FERC reporting is the Federal Energy Regulations Commission and North America where we need to do reporting that we don't do that in the box today. So that's important for our energy utilities and customers. And we're also doing some enhancements to compatible units as part of that.
• Another area that we've had on the drawing board for a long time is the Asset Integration Initialization capabilities, that enables us to take 2D and 3D and potentially in future even 4D and 5D models and ingest that into IFS Cloud and also be able to visualize that alongside the relevant objects in the structure. So, if you got an equipment structure, for instance, you're able to see the 3D model and should automatically also be connected. The metadata in the application with the drawing that you want to look at as part of it, and lots of really exciting use cases for it. But the challenge is that if you want that type of 3D model, you need to also connect it and there's a lot of effort associated with doing that. In many cases, we want to add intelligence, so that's what we can automate a lot more of.
• The last part might not be of interest to you, but we do also do a significant investment into what we call Asset Transfer. A defence scenario for instance where you're going to have an aircraft you want to take information about the asset history, what work is in progress and work backlog, resources, tools etcetera. And you want to export that from one environment and import into another and you get all the history as part of it. And then at some point it might be returned back to you as well. An example of that could be the US Navy, for instance, that deploy a squadron somewhere else, and we need to bring that asset information with them. And they need to put it on USB stick, put in the pocket, fly over and then load it into the system on the other side.

Slide: We need your help

• We'd want to engage and share some of our thinking when we start to do some of these things including the P2 work and when we get our hands on Falkonry, the expectation is that my team will also test it out as part of the overall APM offering so that when we get to 24R1, there is a described package of the capabilities that we can provide to our customers.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

Slide: Electronic Signatures with Adobe Sign

• Q: Is this a generic function in document handling?
  A: Yes. Any way you use document management, you can make use of this, yes. Do you have a specific example in mind for that question?
  R: Yeah, so we have some design documents that we're sending to suppliers that we need that type of information on the documents and we're working right now with it. So we'll probably we should wait a little bit. 
  Q: When is this becoming available?
  A: It's in 23R2 so it's in the release that is coming out now in November.
  Q: And does it require a license from Adobe Sign?
  A: Yeah, the pricing is based on signing of what Adobe call envelopes and you could buy them in bundles from IFS as part of this, so you don't really need to liaise with Adobe. One thing I probably need to mention is that this is available currently when you're running in the managed cloud, because there are some things that Adobe need to improve in their offering so we can actually get information about the usage from customers that are running on Prem. And not sure if you're in the cloud.
  Q: So, you have to send it away?
  A: Well, within managed cloud, we can capture the use ourselves, but it's not easy to get that directly from Adobe and that's something Adobe needs to improve in their offering so we can get information about that there. So it will be difficult for us to control usage if it's an on Prem deployment that you have. Are you on-prem or in the managed cloud?
  R: We are on-prem.
  F: If this is of interest right, I think it's interesting to explore how can you still make use of this. Because it's a challenge for us if lots of customers on Prem make use of this because we have to do manual efforts to actually follow up on this until Adobe provides us with that capability. But I don't think you should rule out the ability to test this out. I would say it's more a reporting challenge than anything else, because you can still run it on prem and be able to use the Adobe signing capability, there’s no technical restriction on that.

Slide: Planned deprecation in 23R2 (Document Management)

• Q: We are in the project now for IFS Cloud and with the file storage we only have one possibility to define one record in the repository. Will it be possible in some way to split it in several storages? Can you define several file storages?
  A: I would need to get back to you on that. I don't really know how file storage has been implemented. For the old storage option, you could have multiple ones and I think for cloud file storage it's only one, but you have any specific use case where you store it in multiple locations? Is that due to geographical distribution?
  R: Yes
  A: I need to go back to you on that. That would be able to answer that for file shares and FTP storage etcetera, but not for cloud file storage.
  F: We have a similar requirement here, to have a split of the file storage places because some of our documents like invoices we have the requirement to store them on a warm device and other documents we just have on a file here. So that's two different places to store them. So similar requirement.

Slide: Currently planned for 24R1(P2 Operational Intelligence)

• Q: Is that taking measurement data from IFS or is that taking instrumentation data off of our IoT devices and putting them to P2 and then the structure is just synchronized over to P2?
  A: That's exactly what it is. The second. So we're not thinking of integrating, even though measurement data from IFS could be an input, but that's maybe not the most obvious one. The most obvious one is OSIsoft or SCADA Historian, AVEVA or online or offline IoT data storage and data should flow, and one of the big difference I think between OI (Operational Intelligence) and BI (Business Intelligence) is that OI can look real time, can look at seconds and with BI, typically you look at weeks, months, years, summaries and this kind of stuff. While the engineers that use OI today, they look at real time, near real time, and then hopefully they don't have to look at all because it will just filter through the calculation engine and send notifications into IFS cloud whenever that is necessary. But that is the typical flow indeed, the second part of your question.

Slide: IFS Acquires Falkonry: Revolutionizing Industry AI

• Q: Any comments from your perspective, how did the application of AI in your data sources, is that something of interest?
  A: Well, when we were talking about the OI stuff, I'm thinking, geez, how do we how do we go through and find all of the anomalies and then set targets around them, or set thresholds around them, but here it is.
  R: I haven’t seen it myself, but I can promise you with a lot of due diligence before we acquired them to validate what they said was correct. But with two weeks of data, that's enough for them. And then after that, it's autonomous and everybody's got two weeks of data, right? So, I have a Tesla myself, do I let my car drive all the time? I know we’re not allowed for it to be fully self driving, but I would not want my car to be driving myself, without me being in control at the moment. And I think it's the same with this. Would you want your business to be run autonomously this way? No, you wouldn't come and combine this maybe with OI and define certain thresholds that you'd like to have as part of that, and you may want to apply this in certain areas fully autonomous without having to being involved at all, because if it makes any false predictions or false anomalies being flagged up, it doesn't really matter that much, but other parts, it can actually be quite serious if it did something that was wrong, right? or if there were anomalies but didn't pick it up.
  F: The use case that I saw was a mining use case, it's a calcite mine I think somewhere in Canada, but they have sometimes rotten ore but they don't know it until the next day, but by that time, the ore is already processed through the whole process and it ruins the last piece in the process, which is an expensive piece of equipment, but they only know it the day after why it was ruined yesterday. And they have applied a few years ago Falkonry to help them detect that earlier so that they can stop the process and fix the machine somehow so that it accepts a lower grade ore for that day and they completely abolished the failure. So it's a classic example of stuff they didn't know that they were looking for. They had data, they had P2 kind of tools but couldn't find the relationship between the failures and the data that they were seeing in the rest of the process, and Falkonry fixed it for them. So, it's quite a quite exciting to be able to find use cases with all clients on how to apply this and get value for you.

If you are an IFS Customer and would like to watch the recording, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com

A copy of the slides can be found in the attachments section below.

Next Meeting: 16 November 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Assets CollABorative - Think Tank: 2024 Focus & Objectives

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