Interview with Dawn Robertson, Offshore Service Line Director at Bureau Veritas 

Could you start by telling us a little bit about Bureau Veritas and what it is that you do?

We are a global classification society and we do test and inspection and certification. We have got around 76 thousand employees across 140 countries so it’s a big footprint within oil and gas but also within other industries as well.

Digitisation is a key topic for the energy industry and a part of Bureau Veritas’ business as well, could you tell us what you’re working on in that space?

The focus for Bureau Veritas for Offshore Europe around digitisation our ‘twintelligence’ campaign. For us, ‘twintelligence’ is actually the ‘twinning’ of expertise and also technology so each day we’ve had a slightly different focus of a piece of technology. Firstly, it was around remote inspections, we use various different types of equipment to do remote inspections which can either be our inspectors doing the inspection themselves or, some of our clients doing that inspection and sending the information back to Bureau Veritas surveyor to look at that and certify their equipment. We have also have a focus today which is our own Veristar Aim 3D, that is our performance and integrity assurance system which is for a digital twin. There is lots of different people talking about digital twins just now but for us, out Veristar Aim 3D is really a mirror representation of an offshore asset. As clients update their system if they put any information into their own systems, the actual Veristar Aim digital twin updates as well. There is a consistent mirror image of their actual physical asset and through doing that they can hopefully be more efficient. We’ve got one client who’s actually already got a digital twin in place who have reported a potential 25% reduction in OPEX costs over the next 5 years so it’s significant in how they run their business now because they’ve got all the information in one place. We also tomorrow, have a focus on hololense which is again a system that can be used for inspection, but it can also be used for training purposes. We use it currently for training for our inspectors. For example, we have got a boiler inspection which is a huge inspection for someone to actually carry out, especially for the first time. We use that in a hologram so that surveyors and inspectors can practice and then at least when they’re on site they get it right first time. That technology will be here tomorrow for people to interact with the news.

Fantastic. So, lots of great new technology coming to the market. How are you finding Offshore Europe this year so far?

I think it’s great. The venue is fantastic, it’s got a real good feel about it and yesterday we thought was busy but today is much busier, and I’m assuming the next couple of days will be the same. The level of inquiries has been really good and the quality of the inquiries that we’ve actually has from people coming to the stand has been excellent so, we’re really happy.

To watch the full interview: click here