In this interview, recorded at Achema 2024 with Mark White from Hexagon’s Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division, discover how Hexagon’s digital solutions transform operations, enhance efficiency, and unlock long-term value across the entire asset lifecycle.
BK: Hello and welcome to today’s podcast episode, where Hydrocarbon Processing sits down with Mark White from Hexagon at Achema 2024 to discuss how the company is driving digital transformation across the asset lifecycle. In this episode, we explore the concept of smart digital reality and how businesses can measure value from within using a comprehensive business value assessment. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoy.
MW: Okay, here we are at Hexagon ‘24. We’re in the Hexagon booth with Mark White. Thank you for taking time out to meet with us today.
MR: Thank you, Mike. My pleasure. It’s good to be here. First time at Achema.
MW: Oh, is it? So what are your initial impressions?
MR: Incredible conference. I was dropped off at about 8:30 this morning. It took me till 9 a.m. to actually reach the booth. That’s how big this place is.
MW: That is enormous.
MR: And I wasn’t walking slowly.
MW: Yeah. We count our steps here in the tens of thousands, I think.
MR: It must be one of the world’s largest conferences.
MW: Yeah, it’s massive. And the right people are here across multiple industries.
MR: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We’ve got a lot of good traction here at the booth.
MW: Good, good. Tell me a little bit about Hexagon and maybe for our audience a little bit about yourself, your role, what you do.
MR: Sure. Yeah. Hexagon is a big Swedish technology company. We have five major divisions. The division we’re in, as I said, lifecycle intelligence. And we provide solutions across the asset lifecycle, mostly for heavy industry, heavy process industries like oil, gas, chemicals, mining, marine, and starting to diversify into other industries as well. But here we’re talking about, of course, chem/petrochem industry. And within that industry we’ve had solutions there for about 50 years, mostly focused on design and engineering, you know, kind of capital projects phase of the asset lifecycle. And we’ve established ourselves as an industry leader in 3D and 2D design in those heavy industries in those complex facilities. I would say going back 7 or 8 years, we’ve been diversifying into the operations and maintenance side of the business through a combination of R&D and acquisition. For example, know about three years ago we acquired Invoice EAM business, paid $2.8 billion for that acquisition, and you know so that EAM asset now is a cornerstone of our own portfolio and is growing very nicely as part of the Hexagon family.
MW: When you say that you’re diversifying into other industries, can you give us a little indication of whether that is going forward?
MR: Yeah. A couple of different levels of diversification. One within those core industries I mentioned, and that is less on the capital projects and more on the operations of maintenance and cybersecurity. We didn’t have much of a presence there despite having many owner operator customers and the design and engineering part of our business. We didn’t have a lot of offerings in the longest part of the asset lifecycle, the, you know, the 40 or 50 years of it, of IT operation, of it being in operation. Exactly. And so we needed to maximize that opportunity with that customer base. And so diversified in that sense has been it’s been very successful for us.
And then diversifying into other industries, taking that entire portfolio, you know, into industries, let’s say, where assets aren’t quite so complex. And you can go downstream, you know, let’s say from a chem/petrochem asset into something not quite as complex, you know, power generation facility even further down into, let’s say, a semiconductor fab manufacturing facility even further and say a datacenter or maybe even a wind and solar park. And so a lot of CapEx is being spent on those last two categories these days. Data centers is dominating the CapEx market. And so now we’re trying to apply starting to apply our portfolio to that vertical as well to take advantage of the, you know, the immense CapEx in that space.
MW: You mentioned that you got a lot of traction today and we talked a little bit about, you know, the right people are here, the right customers, the right companies. Tell me a little bit about like, what’s your goal here? What is your objective? What are some of your objectives?
MR: Yeah, we’re on the cusp of a major launch of a flagship product or an asset lifecycle solution called SDX2. We’ve had asset lifecycle information management solutions now for about 20 years. The latest iteration was launched about seven years ago, SDX, and we have reimagined, re-engineered that platform to be SaaS only multi-tenant, scalable environment that is much more flexible and agnostic in terms of the data that we can collect, both on the project side of the asset and when the asset is created, taken in all kinds of different formats for, let’s say, you know, 3D models as well as 2D information as well, as well as unintelligent documents and what we’d like to say is modifying them, making them intelligent and contextualizing them. And doing that. And when I say context, the context of the model, the context of the, you know, the facility. And we are really then extending that value of that asset as into the operations and maintenance phase as an operational twin and keeping that twin evergreen and weaving in solutions for process safety and operational safety and, you know, things like maintenance and predictive maintenance, preventive maintenance. So all of those things get the benefit of the operational twin, not only in the creation of a greenfield facility, but now with reality capture technology, you know, being able to take laser scans and contextualizing them so that you can do a similar kind of operational twin solution for a brownfield facility where there isn’t a model. You know, perhaps the facility is 10, 15, 20 years old. They don’t have a 3D model. But now scanning technology, much of which is also provided by Hexagon, is able to capture the scan, create a match of a facility, and then again to contextualize in a similar way to the model using the 2D and even one dimensional data that may be available for that facility and given a new lease of life and ensuring that data can be found. And that process is run effectively by leveraging that data, you know, in ways that were never before achievable.
MW: Right. And ways in the past maybe that they had to go off a PNID or something like that or those kind of one D applications.
MR: Yeah, yeah. The combination of, you know, simple documentation kind of one D documentation, 2D PNID, schematics of various kinds, but not really intelligent documents, you know. You know, some of the other players in this space don’t even have a data centric approach to schematic creation. So we not only have that, we can bring in that unintelligent data and combine that with the intelligent data within our core solution and ensure that the asset is captured and contextualized comprehensively so that there are no real gaps where again, information can’t be found in support of a process, an important safety process, some compliance efforts, and it saves a lot of time in preventing or allowing those documents to be found much more quickly than previously.
MW: So I understand you’re going to be giving a presentation or a talk tomorrow on the innovation stage. What can you tell us about that?
MR: Yes, that’s right, Mike. I’m talking about value across the of digital transformation, across the asset lifecycle. We have a solution. We’ve talked SDX2. That really is the heart of what we call the smart digital reality. And it’s one thing, as we just talked about, all the reasons why you would do this in the projects phase and in the O&M phase, you know, access to information is the most common reason. But we’ve found that our customers, some of our customers struggle to justify the investment. It’s not simple. You know, it’s not a trivial undertaking. It’s not a one and done. It’s a journey. And the phrase you’ve got to meet the customers where they are, our customers in many different places, but every one of them, yes, especially we find owner operators have formality around their investment requests. So we’ve actually tackled that problem. We’ve launched a platform with a function for value engineering that we call AdvantX. So HxGN AdvantX. And the idea is that we can work on the front side when we first are introduced to a new customer, let’s say, or an existing customer is looking to expand into other areas. We help them build a business case based on the solution that is embedded in our technology. They don’t really know how to quantify that value. Not only do we know how to do it, we’ve somewhat automated it in an enterprise platform that enables all of our consultants in the field to engage with customers on a much deeper level to create this business value assessment. And it’s really a three phase process because what we’ve developed the business case, once they’ve got initial approval to proceed with the implementation, phase one of the digital transformation has to be done in a way that allows them to measure that value. And then once that solutions in place and we get through the adoption phase, then we get into what we call value realization. Now customer success function is empowered now to measure the value that our solutions are delivering in ways that we have not been able to do in the past, and therefore justifying the success or approving the success of phase one to justify continuing into phase two. The whole point of my presentation tomorrow is, you know, digital transformation efforts fail. The biggest reason they fail is because value is not measured from the outside and captured throughout the lifecycle. That’s what we’re bringing to the table with HxGN AdvantX.
MW: Well, I know you’re a very busy man and we really appreciate you taking time out again to speak with us.
MR: Absolutely. My pleasure, Mike.
MW: Thanks.
MR: Great to see you. Thanks for having me on.
MW: Thank you. Live from the Hexagon area at Achema ‘24.
