Ann-Christin explains why TechnipFMC is committed to our digital journey

Digital technologies are creating a new industrial revolution that impacts oil and gas. We are orchestrating our own digital transformation. Ann-Christin Andersen, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, explains why TechnipFMC is committed to our digital journey.

Q. Why is digital so important to TechnipFMC?
Ann-Christin Andersen (ACA): Digital transformation is an opportunity for TechnipFMC to shape the future in the world’s energy industry. Our clients are seeing the potential to lower their costs significantly. Our digital journey is needed so we remain their preferred partner and integrator. Our aim is not to be a digital company, but to achieve business impact though the use of digital technologies and new business models.

Q. What is new with digital? 
ACA: The industry has long experience in using “digital” technology. For years, we have used analytics and simulation to improve uptime for our clients’ refineries. Today’s novelty is the “connectivity” that new digital technologies bring, combined with cost-effective data storage. This allows for a step change in advanced analytics and provides insights to the right people faster. For example, we have converted fatigue analysis for wellheads from a labor-intensive report to a smart prediction application, giving customers their remaining well life in seconds rather than months. 

Q. What benefits will digital bring to the company?
ACA: Done right, significant efficiency gains. I mentioned well life, but another example is changing our execution to a data-centric approach. At present, we are document driven – one of our subsea projects delivered 100,000 pages with three manual signatures per page to “document quality of the products” to our client. Being data centric can reduce man-hours and improve quality.
Digital brings new insights to understand and manage risks, which opens doors for new business models. Subsea is now offering optimized production and increased productivity services to our clients. 
As we fuse our domain knowledge with digital and scale our insights, we create business impact in the form of efficiency and new revenue streams. Done right, digital also enables people to have a great experience working with, and for, TechnipFMC.

Q. Our clients are hugely enthusiastic about digital. Why is that?
ACA: They see the potential to significantly reduce their unit costs (CAPEX and OPEX), and believe sharing and connecting data helps value creation in the energy market. 
Customers are using digital to be competitive in a low-cost energy mix and to lower carbon footprint. Big data allows pattern recognition to predict and, in the future, prevent accidents and keep our people safe.

Q. How does our digital program tie in with TechnipFMC’s overall strategy?
ACA: Completely! Digital for us is not “the end, but the means to the end”. Thus, our digital strategy supports our company’s strategic goals, and we have spent time with all three global business units to agree to key organizational changes that our digital transformation should drive. Keywords for change are customer engagement, lean mindset and leadership agility.

Q. You’ve chosen to partner with IMD Switzerland to assist with our transformation. Why did you pick this university?
ACA: We admire its unique global digital business transformation center headed by Professor Michael Wade. IMD gives us high-quality learning material and very good advice.