- Bundled digitalization competence
- New company is part of the Group’s strategy 2020
Industrial services provider Bilfinger is bundling its innovative digitalization business in a new subsidiary. The founding is aimed at delivering leading-edge services to customers in the process industry – a key component of the Group strategy 2020. With its core competences, the company can apply digital solutions to enhance the efficiency of plants and increase their availability and performance.
Tom Blades, CEO at Bilfinger: “Creation of the new digitalization company allows us to bundle Group-wide competences in this field and establish an independent unit. It puts us in a position to react faster and more flexibly to market conditions. For our customers, Bilfinger becomes a digitalization leader in the process industry – putting digital projects in the fast lane”.
The new unit will be the center of competence for digitalization, a place within the Bilfinger Group where experts and knowledge are brought together. The objective is to develop digital innovations for the process industry and bring them to market. The diverse range of competences from the business segments Engineering & Technologies (E&T) and Maintenance, Modifications & Operations (MMO) will be used more intensively for standardized digital applications and strengthened through the addition of new solutions.
The need for digitalization in the process industry is especially pronounced at medium-sized companies. With its technologies, Bilfinger is in a position to significantly increase the efficiency of a plant, decrease maintenance costs and to reduce unplanned downtimes. The underlying concept for the digitalization of the process industry is called “BCAP®” (Bilfinger Connected Asset Performance). In terms of content, it complements the Bilfinger Maintenance Concept (BMC) and provides a positive boost for traditional maintenance services.
BCAP collects all key operating data in a cloud-based platform. Information from engineering, operations and maintenance flows into the platform in a coordinated form, making it possible to carry out a targeted evaluation. Data sources include, for example, the process control system, the production planning and sensors used to monitor the plant. With the help of BCAP, these previously separate data silos are linked and subjected to an intelligent analysis. And the longer the data is collected, the more precise are the conclusions that can be drawn in terms of cause and effect. This means that defects are easier to anticipate and unplanned downtimes can be reduced. Maintenance is thus increasingly forward-looking and the much larger data basis is the foundation for this step.
Franz Braun, Chief Digital Officer: “Digitalization offers tremendous opportunities for the process industry. With BCAP, we are taking on a leading role and are closing a gap in the market. We are offering our customers consulting, digital networking data collection and analysis as well as forward-looking maintenance from a single source. This should generate a big growth spurt for the new unit and for the Group in general. Our proximity to the customer and technical competence are the basis for digital success.”
Initial positive results are visible in a number of digital pilot projects, e.g. with Münzing Chemie, CABB and Siegfried. Customers can now access information on the digitalization of plants with just a few clicks on the newly integrated Bilfinger platform. All engineering, maintenance, production, environmental and energy data recorded during the lifecycle of the plant is also systematically collated and analyzed. From the data portfolio created as a result, new potentials for the enhancement of plant efficiency and availability can be tapped into and leveraged for the customer.
Target markets for the new company will initially be the core regions Continental and Northwest Europe. As a second step, Bilfinger’s digitalization company has North America and the Middle East in its sights.