London-based Lloyd’s Register started in 1760 as an organization that verified and classified the condition of sailing vessels. It has evolved to become one of the world’s leading providers of engineering and technology solutions for the maritime industry. One reason for its longevity: Lloyd’s Register has not stopped innovating and is using the cloud to leap forward.
In a recent LinkedIn Live session, “Providing a Foundation for Modern Business,” Maribel Lopez, CEO of Lopez Research, hosted a roundtable with Oz Rodriguez, head of Product Go-To-Market Strategy at Lloyd’s Register, and Ivo Bauermann, senior vice president and head of Business Development for SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
During the discussion, Rodriguez explained how a technology platform strategy helped Lloyd’s Register develop new customer offerings for oil and gas companies, particularly those involved in downstream oil and gas production. The conversation also provided advice to organizations embarking on digital transformation about how to pick the right technology platform to fuel that transformation.
Rodriguez’s priority was to leverage Lloyd’s Register’s experience in improving maritime vessels and structures and apply it to a software offering that would solve common problems faced by energy providers.
“We intimately understand assets and how they can fail,” said Rodriguez. “We can use this to help develop the best maintenance or inspection plans for their equipment. But if we have to build the infrastructure by ourselves, it takes too much time.”
That’s why Lloyd’s Register chose SAP BTP to help develop AllAssets, its asset performance management solution. Lloyd’s Register already used SAP for its internal business processes and as the foundation for other customer services. With SAP’s expertise in the energy market and Rodriguez’s ability to leverage existing SAP skills and technology already within the company, he reported selecting SAP was a “no brainer.”
AllAssets aims to eliminate unscheduled downtime and to provide cost optimizations for maintenance and inspection procedures, ensuring that assets operate at peak efficiency. With a virtual image of industrial machinery, energy providers can remotely assess the health of industrial machinery, monitor reliability and performance, and proactively identify issues before they become accidents – with potentially disastrous effects on people and the planet.
But to create AllAssets, the team at Lloyd’s Register needed a cohesive system that provided full oversight. “When we developed the solution, we wanted to fix the problem of siloed systems, which we estimate causes 20% to 30% in lost revenue,” said Rodriguez.
That’s where SAP Integration Suite, part of the SAP BTP platform, came in. Rodriguez explains that the suite helped create workflows that let customers bring information into the AllAssets application and provided a uniform way of looking at their business information.
In addition, SAP BTP had the data capabilities that were critical for Lloyd’s Register. “For us, data is crucial – you need the right data at the right time to make the best decisions,” said Rodriguez. “This platform allows us to be an enabler from that standpoint and that’s why working with SAP has been great.”
An early adopter of SAP BTP, Rodriguez is enthusiastic about the recently added low-code and no-code capabilities within the platform. He believes this – and the library of pre-built services – allows his team to focus on further differentiating their customer offerings.
This plug-and-play model aligns with how SAP views the platform. “SAP provides building blocks with industry expertise,” said Bauermann. “SAP BTP is unified set of software services that allows you to integrate business processes, orchestrate business data, and easily create applications for unique user experiences.”
For those considering how a technology platform fits into their digital transformation strategy, Rodriguez cautions not to move too fast. “Many people thought digital transformation means move everything into the cloud and digitize everything,” he said. “But that can lead to siloed apps. If they’re not integrated into a single platform with a single view, it creates more problems than it solves.”
He also believes that digital transformation should eliminate waste. So carefully evaluate the processes that need digitizing. In some instances, manual processes suffice whereas automating others may increase efficiency.
Similarly, don’t waste your human resources – use your people and their talents wisely. Rodriguez advises: do what you’re good at and leverage vendors’ platform expertise. “If you have to build orchestration and APIs for everything as well as manage security, then you’re spending cycles doing things you’re not specialized in,” said Rodriguez.
Last, pick a vendor that can grow with you. According to Rodriguez, good software is always evolving, keeping pace with the demands of its customers – and their customers. “Because SAP BTP evolved and matured, it’s allowed us to increase our vision and ambition,” he said.
For more, watch the replay of “Providing a Foundation for Modern Business.”
Robin Meyerhoff is head of Communications for SAP Business Technology Platform.