Known for its world-class energy capabilities and global portfolio, Woodside is Australia's largest independent oil and gas company. A critical secret to their success is hiring great people and then developing and enabling them to be even better.
However, the company faced a challenge that many other asset-intensive organisations will be familiar with; Every time an experienced, highly-qualified technician retries, their experience and knowledge walk out the door with them. Woodside, like many other complex businesses, didn’t have a robust mechanism to retain the knowledge of senior experts and make it possible for junior employees to locate, analyse, and learn from it. As a result, work was often slow, mistakes happened, and productivity was not at the level is needed to be to stay competitive.
IBM’s Watson IoT Platform was the solution that Woodside needed. Today, Woodside harnesses the power of IBM Watson technology and cognitive computing to extract meaningful insights from 30 years of complex engineering data to enable fast, fact-driven decision making on complex projects – not matter who the technician on site is.
AUD 10M savings in employee costs because of faster access to and more intuitive analysis of engineering records.
75% reduction in time spent by the geoscience team reading and searching through data sources.
Accelerates expertise by giving staff unlimited access to 30 years of tribal knowledge.
Woodside Energy had a big IoT vision for their business. However, they also understood the importance of starting with a small achievable project and growing from there.
The Watson for Projects instance was Woodside’s first IBM Watson deployment. To start, the organization worked with IBM to create the corpus of knowledge at the centre of the solution by uploading approximately 30 years’ worth of documents related to activities in constructing and running its facilities. The goal was to set Watson up so the system can not only provide valuable insights but also continuously learn and improve.
Today, Watson enables Woodside to mine their millions of documents, serve up relevant insights to their engineers instantly, and does it all in the language that engineers speak and understand. However, Watson does more than just saving Woodside time and money. Finding the right advice faster gives Woodside a competitive head start, leading to safer and better decisions across the company, and ultimately more energy getting to more people in more effective ways.