Stork: Maintaining Customer Support with Onsight

Accelerating decisions and maintaining customer support is at the forefront of many organizations. I spoke with Stewart Wallace; Digital Transformation Manager, from Stork on how they are meeting and exceeding their commitment to their customers in this extremely different environment by exploring and utilising different digital solutions; one of which is Onsight from Librestream.

Stork, A Fluor Company is a global provider of integrated operations, maintenance, modification, and asset integrity solutions. They work in over 100 countries and serve more than 4,000 clients across six continents.

 

How has the current global situation brought by Covid-19 changed your approach?

Digital innovation is a key agenda item for us here at Stork. The travel restrictions and site access constraints introduced to tackle COVID-19 has accelerated key elements of our digital strategy. Onsight has supported our priority objective to maintain business continuity for us and our clients in this challenging time.

 

What was the industry challenge problem that led you to select Onsight?

One of Stork’s delivery themes within our overall digital strategy is to enable our people working in the field to have the knowledge, data, and information they need to do their jobs effectively and efficiently.  One area we have focused on is the adoption of remote digital inspections and the provision of remote expert capabilities to our field staff.

We see these capabilities as key to Stork offering a service which aligns to the evolving needs of our industry including:

• Enhancing worker safety by removing the requirement to travel and enter manufacturing facilities, ensures remote locations now covered
• Scarce expert resources can be better utilised, providing improved access to Stork’s specialist expertise; enhancing quality assurance
• Increasing productivity by spending less time travelling (and reporting) with time focused on conducting inspection activities
• Simpler and quicker inspections.
• Offering greater flexibility to our inspection delivery models, ensuring business continuity in challenging situations
• Sustainable reduced carbon footprint in line with net zero targets

 

What led your team to select the Onsight Platform?

We assessed many different types of solutions including consumer messaging applications, as well as online meeting solutions and enterprise remote expert techniques. During our exploratory phase, we ran several short Proof of Concepts in our own facilities to better understand availability, capabilities, differences, and similarities of several solutions. The technology market is very congested and there are many solutions out there which can be used to connected and collaborate remotely. We chose Librestream because it offered a number of capabilities which we did not see in the others. It was the right tool to augment our evolving digital toolbox and several of our team members have experience of deploying Librestream. Our decision on which tool to use was driven by a variety of factors, including the criticality of the job, the technical readiness of the location we will be working at, as well as the proprietary information requirements of the task at hand. Onsight Connect offers Stork several unique features above the other applications, which lends itself to the higher criticality jobs we undertake e.g. ability to take detailed photographs, even on a lower quality line.

 

Can you describe some use cases of the solution?

In the first two months of travel restrictions Stork successfully over 100 2nd and 3rd party remote digital inspections, supporting 7 clients across 17 projects with 19 stork inspectors. These inspections were quicker, safer, and provide future scalability for our clients. Business continuity, with no loss in quality for our clients was delivered using several of our digital solutions including Onsight.

We have primarily conducted remote Factory-Acceptance-Testing (FAT) activities with the use of Onsight.

We had a situation recently where an inspection was able to take place at a remote site with social distancing measures in place. A Stork inspector and representative from the end-client was to be present to witness the testing activities. Although a local Stork inspector could attend, client project representatives were unable to travel to the site, so the Onsight solution was selected to ensure everyone could still virtually attend.

 

The job was to conduct Factory Acceptance Test of a new Deluge and Foam Skid for an offshore oil and gas client. The new equipment was in the factory and test conditions were used to simulate the operation of the new equipment, including the water flow and pressures across the system.

Key activities included:

• Both parties walking through the key steps in the FAT procedure
• Water hoses were connected to key inlets and outlets to simulate connections to the plant
• Valve positions were opened and closed and readings taken on the appropriate gauges

The FAT was able to continue with all parties connected remotely, witnessing and photographing the key points in the testing schedule, preventing the need to postpone the event and miss meeting project timelines.

 

Looking ahead, what does the future hold for you and your team?

In the new normal, we expect to continue to leverage Onsight to support our inspection business and other product lines. We are on a digital journey at Stork and we want to continue to work in an agile way, supporting our customers to meet project milestones.  As we deliver more Remote Digital Inspections, we enhance our knowledge of the tool and are able to mitigate some of the challenges this new way of working presents us with.  We want to seize opportunities to utilise new digital techniques and continue to develop our digital offering and partnering with digital companies is key to this. As we progress through our road map for Remote Digital Inspections, the Onsight toolkit presents the opportunity to widen our offering.  This includes considering where artificial intelligence, such as computer vision, could enrich our capabilities. Stork is moving towards a digital toolkit to support our colleagues in the field, a nice feature of the Onsight solution is the ability to integrate Onsight into our own custom application in the future. Stork’s digital team anticipate that this is simply the start of the adoption of remote solutions.  These tools will become more common place in the field over the next few years as we strive to extend and support the knowledge and capabilities of our expert networks in ways not yet seen in the industry.

 

This post was written by Darren Lindsay, Account Manager – Oil & Gas at Librestream / Energy & Stewart Wallace,  Digital Transformation Manager at Stork, A Fluor Company.