PETRONAS wins in the Digital – Oil and Gas category in Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards

It received the award for its Pipeline Engineering Solution, P-PiES.

In oil and gas exploration and production, the most economical way to transport hydrocarbon is through pipelines. In PETRONAS, designing pipelines is a constant activity, filled with challenges including disorganised data, dependency on third-party for analysis, and the need to have manual review and revisions, making the entire process long and sometimes slow. 

In 2019, PETRONAS deployed a team of in-house technical experts to solve these pain points. The solution? To digitalise and automate the pipeline engineering process, which resulted in the launch of the PETRONAS Pipeline Engineering Solution (P-PiES) in 2020.

P-PiES allows engineers to leverage solutions that give them visibility of data and insights across pipeline engineering. It mainly focuses on the key elements of data, connectivity, analytics, and quantitative analysis. The system is a suite of integrated engineering tools developed to make designing pipelines, reporting and cost estimation more efficient with digital. This enables the pipeline design to be automated, have instant results, and be accessible anytime, anywhere, and anyway.

The system has grown from its initial stage to the current stage, where three main modules were introduced to resolve the pain points, which have been integrated into cloud computing, hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, and integrated into the PETRONAS internal resources and system. They are:

1. Pipeline Integrated Design Engineering Solutions (PiDES) for offshore and onshore pipeline engineering analysis, including advanced (Finite Element) engineering analysis.
2. Pipeline Cost Estimation (PiCE), a cost estimation tool report generation using Power BI.
3. Pipeline Documents (PiDoc), with three submodules for automated creation of design reports, storing legacy project data, managing technical review and assurance, queries and deviations to PETRONAS Technical Standards and International Standards. The annual awards programme recognises exceptional companies riding the disruption wave and leading the technological revolution and digital journeys of their respective industries to boost Malaysia’s fast-growing economy. 

In granting this award, the judges considered the achievements of the project. Apart from reducing hours to complete the design analysis, it also ensures data transparency. As a result, this led to cost savings and improved productivity. Using P-PiES, the pipeline engineering department recorded 40% optimisation in manpower hours, whilst engineering work duration was also reduced by up to 50%. 

With a unified application, processes are ensured to have efficiency and raised productivity. Therefore, engineers can focus on high impact, value-added tasks instead of manual and repetitive work.

In addition, P-PiES forms a unified system for the PETRONAS engineering fraternity to perform analysis and reporting by using cloud services. It enables flexibility and compatibility for various devices via a digital platform, opening the possibility for integration with other digital solutions.