Application Case 8.2 (Continued) dashboards and reports depicting these details QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION using Microsoft Azure and sends it to the appro 1. What type of information would likely be col- priate stakeholders. This gives their stakehold lected by an oil and gas drilling platform ens a good idea about the health of their capital 2. Does this application fit the three V's of Big Data assets (volume, variety, velocity)? Why or why not? The Connected Enterprise solution by 3. Which other industries could use similar opera- Rockwell has accelerated growth for many oil and tional measurements and cashboards? gas companies like Hilcorp Energy by bringing their operations data to the cloud platform and Source Customers.microsoft.com. (2015). Rockwell Automation helping them reduce costly downtime and main racing the oil and gas industry with 107. htpo//entemen microsoft.com/pages/Customer Story,aspx?recid=19922 accessed tenance. It has resulted in a new business oppor. August 2016), Microsoft.com. (nd). Customer stories Hockwell tunity for industrial age stalwarts like Rockwell Automation http://www.micromit.com/en-us/crud platformet Automation tomer-series-rockwell-automation (accessed July 2016 Application Case 8.2 Rockwell Automation Monitors Expensive Oil and Gas Exploration Assets Rockwell Automation is one of the world's largest oil 24 hours a day. A single failure in equip- providers of industrial automation and information ment can cost Hilcorp a lot of money. Rockwell solutions. It has customers in more than 80 countries connected electrical variable drives of pumping worlwide, and the company has around 22,500 equipment to the cloud (see next section), so employees. One of its business areas of focus is that these machines can be controlled thou- assisting oil and gas companies in exploration. An sands of miles away from the control room example is Hilcorp Energy, a company that drills oil in Ohio. Sensors capture data, and through in Alaska. The equipment used in drilling, extracting, Rockwell's control gateway, this data is passed and refining oil is very expensive. A single fault in on to Microsoft Azure Cloud and then reaches the equipment can cost the oil and gas company Hilcorp engineers through digital dashboards, around $100,000 to $300,000 per day in lost produc- Dashboards provide real-time information about tion. To deal with this problem, technology that can pressure, temperature, flow rate, and dozens monitor the status of such equipment remotely and of other parameters that help engineers moni- can predict issues that can likely happen well ahead tor health and performance of the equipment. of time is required These dashboards also display alerts about any Rockwell Automation considered it an oppor- likely issues. When one of Hilcorp's pieces of tunity to expand their business in oil and gas indus- pumping equipment failed, it was identified, tries by gathering data from the exploration sites tracked, and repaired in less than an hour, sav- and analyzing it to improve efficiency and drive ing 6 hours of tracing the failure and the cost better performance. The company is bringing its involved in lost production vision of Connected Enterprise using Microsoft's TOT 2. Building Smarter Gas Pumps Nowadays to provide monitoring and support of oil and gas some delivery trucks use liquid natural gas equipment placed in remote areas. Rockwell is now (LNG) as fuel oil companies are updating providing solutions to predict failure of equipment their filling stations to incorporate LNG pumps along the petroleum supply chain, monitor their Rockwell Automation installed sensors and health and performance in real time, and help pre- variable frequency drives at these pumps to vent their failure in the future. They are providing collect real-time data about operations of solutions in the following areas equipment, inventory of fuel, and consumption 1. Drilling: Hilcorp Energy has its pumping rate. This data is transmitted to Rockwell's cloud equipment stationed in Alaski, where it drills platform. Rockwell then generates interactive (Continued)