Accenture, Woodside data deal

Management consultant Accenture has become the latest contractor to win technology related operations work in the resources industry, this time for the provision of data analytics at Woodside's Pluto LNG facility.

Information about Pluto's assets will be received and processed in real time, and the companies hope using technology in this way will lower costs compared with traditional manual checking.

Accenture oil and gas managing director Paul Carthy said it was part of a trend towards greater usage of data in the industry, to reduce costs as commodity prices remained soft.

He said the aim of the program would be predictive and preventative, to find and resolve issues early.

“(We’ll be) trying to give them that visualisation and surveillance angle that will help them all the way from the c-suite level, all the way down through the organisation to help engineers as well and asset managers,” Mr Carthy said.

He said Woodside had liked the architecture of Accenture’s program.

“This is a bit of a foundation of the house for the future intelligent operations work they’ll do as well,” Mr Carthy said.

“Our analytics platform is all about the service.”

Yesterday, GE won a contract to provide subsea services, including data analytics and predictive maintenance, at Chevron’s energy operations in the state’s north-west.

That agreement included additional work, however, such as project management, inventory storage, wellheads, training and engineering analysis.

Earlier this, Business News reported that Woodside would be working with data analytics companies to forecast maintenance issues and reduce costs.

At the time, Woodside vice president (strategy, science and technology) Shaun Gregory said that the analytics deparment at Woodside had ramped up very quickly.

"Four months ago we had nothing in analytics, today our analytics platform is larger than Twitter,” he said in August.