Executive Overview
This report, based upon 45 interviews that ARC Advisory Group con-ducted with industry professionals, focuses on the upstream shale oil & gas value chain.
The Downstream & Petrochemical Asia 2014 conference/exhibition in Singapore, October 29-30, was just one of the energy-related events of the Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW). SIEW takes place each October in Singapore.
Related events includes the Asia Clean Energy Summit, Gas Asia Summit, Singapore Energy Summit, and a number of themed roundtables on topics such as Electricity Market Reform, Clean Coal Technology, Cyber Security in the Energy Sector, and LNG Industrial Trends in China.
The state of automation is rapidly changing. One of the main reasons for this changing landscape is the advent of smart devices. ARC Advisory Group defines smart devices as having:
Since the industrial revolution, industrial control had relied on tightly coupled systems to transmit control signals. Industrial plants have used "modern" control via wired electronic signals for over half a century, making the market ripe for a new technology to disrupt the current methods.
Automation suppliers saw their revenues grow by nearly 5 percent in the third quarter of 2014. Suppliers to the process industries posted some-what slower growth despite strong activity in the oil & gas and energy sectors. Largely due to a resurgence in investment activity in the electronics and automotive industries in Asia and North America, suppliers to the discrete industries continue to see stronger revenues. Japanese suppliers continued to gain disproportionate benefit from a weaker yen and an uptick in domestic investments in plant upgrades and other projects.
Many industrial organizations today struggle with how to best support, sustain, and improve their automation and information systems over the lifetimes of these important assets. History indicates an evolution in expectations based on the changing technologies and skills required to build and maintain automation hardware and software applications.
Oil & gas companies today are under increasing pressure to deliver business value from capital investments in less time while ensuring the safety of workers and driving out cost. Information technologies have long played a role in enabling a manufacturing business to operate safely and profitably. Several factors now make it attractive for these and other industrial enterprises to consider externalizing their IT infrastructure to public cloud service models.
The emergence of three-dimensional (3D) scanning technology has empowered manufacturers looking to track, trace, and verify the quality of their parts. Manufacturers are finding that validating the key features and specifications of work in process offers tremendous value because production problems can be addressed before errors are propagated down the line.
The flagship annual Economic Survey of India provides a detailed analysis and record of major trends and developments in the economy. More importantly, it provides the backdrop to the budget proposal in the parliament. The 1990s saw the end of single-party domination and rise of coalition Governments. The elections in April and May 2014 once again brought back single-party rule in the country, that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Lifecycle Support of Embedded Software a Weak Point