Scottish Apprenticeship Week 2021 is a time to share the value apprenticeships can bring to individuals, employers and the economy. The theme for 2021is Business Backing Talent, showcasing the great things that happen when employers back talent through apprenticeships.

At Add Energy we have found that supporting apprentices through their studies has brought a wealth of benefits to both our team of apprentices and our company, from upskilling our people through formal learning and development opportunities to improving the productivity of our business functions and thus the quality of our services to our clients.

As part of Scottish Apprenticeship Week, our team of Add Energy apprentices have shared their experiences as well as the benefits of learning while you work.

The University of Salford’s annual HackCamp event, moved to a virtual platform in 2021, seeing 160 undergraduate computing students work together and compete to build industry software systems being led by 11 industry partners, including TOTAL E&P, Add Energy and HR in One.

At Add Energy, we recognize the importance of innovation, technology and digitalization and invest significant effort into the research and development of software solutions, which is why we were so honored to be able to be part of this important event for upskilling up-and-coming developers.

As a consultancy business to the energy sector and beyond, we are uniquely positioned to provide insights to shared challenges plant operators face, enabling us to suggest concepts and guidance for developing solutions that will provide students with experience of solving real-world industry challenges.

Peter Adam our EVP, R&D Manager; Hossein Ghavimi and our Learning Delivery Lead, Mike Meen worked closely with and mentored their assigned group of student developers during a 3 week ‘hackathon’ as they applied research of tailoring agile software development methods and familiarized themselves with techniques for communicating and presenting work to their HackCamp partner clients.

The competition was judged by a panel of industry professionals and we were delighted to see the 1st place prize go to the group who developed Add Energy’s concept into cloud-database-driven dashboard for risk management, impressing the judges with their original use of web scraping and the possibility for the inclusion of machine learning to identify future risks.

David Logie recently joined the Add Energy team as an Engineer within our Asset and Integrity Management division. With a background in mechanical maintenance in the energy sector, we wanted to chat with David to learn about the challenges he faced working within a fast-paced maintenance environment, and uncover his lessons learned and tips for ensuring maintenance is conducted as effectively and efficiently as possible.

As a result of the ongoing global pandemic, the ability to resource for maintenance execution has become a challenge for many companies and has resulted in a significant increase in maintenance backlog.

When there is a bow-wave of work to manage, it is crucial to look for opportunities to prioritize and liquidate work effectively, based on risk and capacity.

A backlog prioritization model or study will determine the risks associated with delaying the work further and will facilitate the decision-making process to determine which work orders should be executed as a priority. Once this has been established, companies can apply execution techniques to liquidate the maintenance in the most efficient and effective way possible.

In this blog, Add Energy’s Senior Consultant, Emeka Onuh discusses how routing, sequencing, and packaging maintenance work orders can make maintenance execution much more efficient, and the profound effects it can have on improving plant and system availability, maintenance team productivity as well as safety.

While most organisations utilize these methods to some degree, they are often disjointed or misunderstood. We recommend viewing this as a combined strategy, with all three elements being reviewed and implemented, to get the most value for your business. Here are some of his top tips on how to successfully implement all three methods.

To service up coming projects for our global clients we are in the process of expanding our pool of reliability, integrity and process safety engineers.

Learn more about the positions below and how to apply.

Ongoing challenges relating to a global pandemic and subsequent low oil price have significantly enhanced the focus on how assets can be run more efficiently. But efficiently doesn’t just mean the lowest cost model, it must include maintaining acceptable risk profiles, and regardless of the challenges and limitations, there are always improvement opportunities to be realized.

In my own experience, I have seen significant improvements identified on both new and mature plants. Savings on older assets, have been in excess of $20M per year, by removing non-value adding maintenance, and for newer plants, savings of $500k+ by modifying the maintenance schedules and spares requirements dictated by the OEMs, moving to maintenance that is tailored to the operating criteria and design intent.

Research shows that delegates are more receptive to training when they have a clear understanding of why they are there and how the training will help both themselves and the business. 

Joining the team less than 18 months ago, Susan Steyn, Add Energy’s Vice President of North America, could not have predicted the challenges that the region would face during 2020.

Based in the Houston office, Susan led her team through a turbulent year. From political unrest, racism protests, severe weather issues, and low oil prices, the team had a lot to handle before even factoring in a global health pandemic.

In this article, Susan takes a look back over the last 12 months and discusses how 2020 was her most successful year to date, lessons learned and her plans for the future.

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