Digitalisation in the Middle East

Our Global Head of ICT and Innovation Jaye Deighton recently spoke at the EIC’s Energy Exports Conference in Aberdeen, sharing our perspective on the Middle East market and the need for digital solutions which align with the region’s ambitious growth agenda.

“Peterson plays a critical role in ensuring intelligent, data-driven, efficient solutions, empowering our clients across the globe to take digital advantage of our decades of our operational experience. This technology offering is a core component of our strategy in the Middle East.

“Data informs almost every aspect of our lives and as a society we have transformed our relationship with data.  In business, we’re still on that journey and it feels like we are only scratching the surface of what is possible.

“I see the demand for data from clients or members of the supply chain growing every day. Data driven decisions are no longer an aspiration; in some cases, it’s now becoming a part of business survival.

“The problem is our data has generally been lying around for years, unloved, a little unmanaged and hidden on spreadsheets. Not ideal when you are trying to organise a logistics strategy for a major compression project or a windfarm project. This was our business about 14 years ago and where many find themselves today, ready to make that change.

“Lighthouse transformed the way we operate. Lighthouse is an ecosystem of applications, owned and developed by Peterson that digitises and streamlines core logistical process, decreases the chance of human error, and provides real-time data which can be used for planning, analysis, and decision making.

Middle East focus

“The Middle East is a market that is incredibly active in oil and gas exploration. We see fantastic opportunities for collaboration.  Exporting the lessons, solutions and best practices which we have learned through decades in the North Sea and apply them, along with a culture of innovation, to projects within the region. From my perspective there feels a desire to harness learning from other parts of the world, but to do it smarter.

“Many of the businesses we have worked with in the region have grown organically. Due to the speed of growth, particularly when it comes to technology and processes, we see lots of decisions have been made in silos and companies are now trying to streamline processes or wrangle data to make it ready for the next wave of AI opportunities

“The Middle East feels incredibly progressive. There’s a huge appetite and curiosity for digitalisation and we see they are advancing quickly with technology solutions and with that means there is access to capital to invest in these solutions.  This is the perfect environment to really push the value of our Lighthouse offering.

“From a process optimisation perspective, our consultancy offering helps identify good foundational practices and methodologies, essentially providing the client with a bespoke logistics play book, the technology can then come in deliver the controls and processes for achieving the ambition. We also see there is a great opportunity to work with operators on their supply bases providing people at a management layer to help further embed these changes into their operations.

How Lighthouse impacts operations

“What makes Lighthouse different from other solutions is that it is built by the people that actually do the job and we’ve proven it in our own operations over the last 14 years and more than 9m tonnes of cargo.

“We’re now expanding the external reach of this technology, establishing a business model where we will now offer Lighthouse to clients as a standalone Software as a Service agreement. Putting it simply, any business can licence the very software we use to run our logistics services, directly into their own business to run their logistics services.

“Alongside Lighthouse, our expert consultancy service draws upon a global pool of industry experts to look at clients’ challenges and identify long-term solutions across logistics and supply chain optimisation incorporating aspects such as, supply base planning, sustainability, personnel and even digital.

“This approach has proved incredibly successful with one of our clients in the Middle East. 

“They were operating on an outdated logistics model resulting in inefficient processes. Working with our consultants on a supply chain logistics optimisation study and use of Lighthouse to implement and embed more efficient processes and digitise their supply chain, they have benefited from significant 32% reduction in logistics costs and 22% reduction in carbon emissions. There have also been improvements in vessel departure compliance, cargo inspection compliance, deck utilisation, CCU utilisation, reduction in incidents and non-compliances, and improvements in fuel consumption.

“The client has now licenced and self-operated our Lighthouse software for five years. It is a core part of their operational processes and continue to engage with our consultancy offering on various projects.”