Historically, subsea original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) lack visibility of product performance in the field. Customers share feedback only when failures occur, often with limited context recorded. In addition, OEMs are often not informed of component failures that do not impact production or trigger maintenance actions, due to the high redundancy level of subsea equipment. Today, advances in cloud computing technology enables effective sharing and use of data, providing the ability to rapidly develop analytics and extract value through visualization. This has renewed the focus on improving product reliability and production uptime through active condition monitoring.

This joint paper will discuss a live subsea data sharing pilot between Aker Solutions and BP. It will present the view from both companies as to the challenges, current and future value. The objectives of the pilot are to improve responsiveness of Aker Solutions’ service team and move from reactive to proactive support of BP operations. Access to data will provide efficiency gains in diagnostic and support capability, closing out issues faster and reducing offshore trips and HSE exposure. Product performance and reliability data will be fed back into product design improvements that will increase future product reliability. Building a baseline of data and applying OEM domain knowledge with the latest techniques in machine learning aims to produce predictive and prescriptive maintenance in the long term. Active monitoring and understanding of product performance is essential to producing more reliable products, and understanding risk in new business models, such as uptime service contracts and equipment leasing.