Software to save millions for energy industry

The cloud-based software, Aim-Hi™, officially launched this week by the Norwegian firm, provides real-time visualisation and data insights into asset performance, maintenance and risk, is the culmination of five years of development.

Developed with the University of Salford, it has already been deployed on a power generation plant, a mining and metals business and a gas processing terminal, where it has helped maintenance teams shortcut the traditionally complex and lengthy process of preparing KPI data manually.

In these case it has halved the amount of time spent on emergency work and reduced corrective maintenance by 8%.

'Better control'

Peter Adam, Executive Vice President of Add Energy, said: “Aim-Hi™ puts asset and maintenance managers back in control - helping them make better, more informed decisions, plan more effectively and address unexpected events efficiently.

“In addition to developing the software in partnership with the University of Salford, Add Energy also conducted multiple user group sessions with Uniper’s CCGT power plant, in the Isle of Grain, UK  to address the common issues relating big data faced by maintenance teams.”

Aim-Hi™ not only provides greater transparency around key performance indicators, but it also enables users to understand why assets are performing as they are and make informed decisions based on reliable, up to date data.

Aim-Hi™ uses graphs to display data enabling users to identify non-compliance instantly, and generates automatic text summaries, explaining what is going on in the graphs. It also automatically generates KPI reports as often as they are want.

Click-of-a-button tech

Aloysius Peter, Business Solutions Architect at Uniper Energy commented: “Aim-Hi™ not only tells you how you are performing against your KPI’s relating to maintenance, but, more importantly, it tells you the why behind them.”

“Gaining access to such insights at the click of a button, enables business to be more efficient by focusing on fixing issues, rather than manipulating data and spending excessive time investigating the reasons behind under performance.’’

Julian Bass, who lectures on Software Engineering at the University of Salford, said: “This has been a fantastic project for us to be involved with and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Add Energy on new software developments over the next few years.

“As operating assets literally have tens of thousands of working parts which have to be maintained, according to a carefully optimised schedule, creating the Aim- Hi™ software was a real test of our ingenuity, and we are delighted it is working so well for Add Energy and its customers.

Real-world course

“The partnership with Add Energy has enabled us to enrich our courses with syllabus updates, assignments and projects based on the issues actually confronted in the commercial energy sector. This improves the employability of our students and ensures our teaching is up-to-date and relevant.

“In addition to this, the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP)* with the University of Salford and Add Energy was recently awarded an ‘Outstanding’ status from Innovate UK, which made us extremely proud. Very few KTPs achieve the accolade.” 

*This partnership received financial support from the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) programme . KTP aims to help businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK knowledge base. This successful Knowledge Transfer Partnership project, funded by UK Research and Innovation through Innovate UK, is part of the government’s Industrial Strategy.