Energizing the sector: Petrosea boosts productivity through its Minerva Digital Platform supported by Microsoft Azure

Over the years, Petrosea has carved a niche for itself within the Indonesian energy sector, as a multi-disciplinary contract mining, engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), and oil and gas services company.

With a commitment that extends beyond just business—to safety, health and environment, quality management, and business integrity—Petrosea remains at the forefront of its industry.

"The energy sector is highly competitive,” asserts Sudarto Unsurlany, Head of Digitalization at Petrosea. “In the mining domain, we face constant price wars." In an industry where prices dictate business dynamics, Petrosea was embroiled in a relentless quest for differentiation. The solution? "An amalgamation of people, processes, and technology," recalls Unsurlany. “We focused on adding value to our services instead of engaging in price wars. We needed to enhance our business efficiency, reduce costs, and generate additional value for our clients." Petrosea set out to move away from antiquated batch processes to gain real-time data and streamline its operations.

Setting the stage for Petrosea's strategic vision was its 3D strategy, introduced in 2019. "Our 3D strategy represents diversification, digitalization, and decarbonization,” shares Kevin William Timothy, Transformation Lead at Petrosea. “It became our key pillar, ensuring our commitment to sustainability and trust-building with stakeholders."

Proving ground for digital transformation

Petrosea’s digital transformation commenced with its mining project in East Kalimantan. Despite the challenge of its remote location, Petrosea successfully deployed multiple Industry 4.0 technologies, including Advanced analytics, smart sensors, and machine learning to transform the project into one of the company’s most profitable projects in just six months.

Thanks to this success, Petrosea was selected by the World Economic Forum as the only mining company and Indonesian-owned company to join its Global Lighthouse Network in 2019. At the time, Petrosea was selected as one of only 10 companies in the world to successfully implement Industry 4.0 technologies to drive performance.

Leveraging data and insights

Earlier, users on the operational side didn't have access to data, which limited their decision-making. Enter Minerva Digital Platform, a solution that leverages real-time operational data, vital performance metrics for problem-solving, and standard operating procedures. It is also a platform to effectively share innovative ideas and perform real-time safety incident reporting. Using the Minerva platform, Petrosea has optimized processes and reduced costs, therefore boosting the company’s performance. "The Minerva Digital Platform has greatly improved our decision-making, transparency, and overall business processes, which has enabled the company to enhance its value proposition to clients," says Unsurlany.

"Now, data gets updated in real-time, instead of at the end of the shift," elaborates Krishna Nawacandra, Digital Project Manager at Petrosea. “We receive hundreds of data points from IoT sensors across our locations, capturing data from the GPS, part vehicles, equipment components, operator behavior, and more.”

One example where using this data helps optimize operations is Petrosea’s fuel analyzer, which ensures that operators utilize equipment in the field more efficiently. Other factors like road or water incidents that can affect fuel consumption are also considered. Another example is the use of sensors to enable predictive maintenance on its trucks, allowing the company to address maintenance issues ahead of time based on equipment conditional monitoring. Furthermore, supervisors use the Fleet Optimization Manager to deploy fewer vehicles and gain more efficiency by monitoring mining operational KPIs such as hanging time, queueing time, bunching analysis, dumping time, and operator compliance.

“With immediate data access, we can make better decisions, such as assigning support equipment to specific roads, intervening incompliant operators, or using historical data to improve equipment operations,” says Nawacandra.

Petrosea has also established a Remote Operations Center (ROC) at its headquarters to monitor and control operations, as well as drive operational excellence at multiple sites remotely. By utilizing real-time data and advanced analytics, the ROC allows Petrosea to plan, operate, and enhance the performance of each site from one central location. In addition, Petrosea is now taking advantage of digital twin mining technology that utilizes modern user interfaces and augmented reality to predict, monitor, understand, as well as optimize its mining operations. “Thanks to this technology, the need for the operational team to physically visit the project site has been reduced,” says Nawacandra. “Instead, the team can analyze operations remotely, utilizing the real-time equipment movement and insights provided through our ROC.”

Around 400 employees use the Minerva platform, including apps on operational sites, mining dashboards using Power BI, and other advanced analytics. “All these innovations led to a nine percent reduction in operational costs, decrease in incidents, and enhanced safety measures with real-time corrective actions. We've also improved operational excellence and workforce training," says Nawacandra.

Delivering cloud-driven excellence

As part of its transformation journey to continue elevating its operations, Petrosea sought to further modernize its processes and gain new efficiencies. "We looked at three leading global network computing providers. Our evaluation revealed the seamless integration of Microsoft Azure with our existing Windows environment,” shares Nawacandra. “Over 90 percent of our environment uses Microsoft Windows. This, and the fact that Microsoft had the most user-friendly interface, significantly influenced our decision to adopt further Microsoft technologies,” adds Unsurlany.

To ensure the security of Petrosea’s digital landscape, it adopted Microsoft Sentinel. “With Sentinel and Microsoft 365 E5 add-on security, we've been able to consolidate incidents. We also use Azure OpenAI Service to automatically summarize every incident and receive recommendations on mediation steps, which are invaluable,” shares Haris Dwi Siswanto, Cyber Security Lead at Petrosea. “Furthermore, we achieved 50 percent security cost reduction after using E5 add-on security as the license provides various tools to enhance the security ecosystem.”

Petrosea's move to Azure brought increased productivity and efficiency. "We are using Microsoft Teams to connect various locations and sites and streamline our communications,” says Nawacandra. “The real-time data we offer about production provides a better basis for our clients to make informed decisions. Plus, we’ve enhanced our customers’ trust with the advanced security measures we gained by moving to Azure.”

The company has also discovered new opportunities for innovation. “This, year, over 70 percent of our digital initiatives are focused on product enhancement. Big projects like SAP migrations to S4/HANA have been particularly successful. In a single year, we have executed over 80 initiatives, many of them benefiting from Azure,” Nawacandra informs. “Additionally, since moving to the cloud, we’ve lowered our carbon emissions.”

Mapping the future

Charting the course for an even brighter future, Petrosea's collaboration with Microsoft remains on the map. "Recently, we have been integrating our Digital Twin platform with Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality devices to advance the mining operational experience. Moreover, we are building a Petrosea security operations center with advanced analytics protection and using Azure OpenAI Service across several use cases in various departments," elaborates Nawacandra. The company is also exploring new technologies in the Copilot Stack (GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Security Copilot), which use Azure OpenAI Service as the engine, and ‘Infrastructure as Code’ tools to automate many development processes on the infrastructure in Azure.

However, Petrosea’s dedication isn't solely towards technological transformation. It remains committed to its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. With a soon-to-launch ESG dashboard—Envo-360—Petrosea aims to foster even greater transparency and accountability in its operations.

Setting the foundation for Petrosea’s future innovation are its people. Unsurlany concludes, “Since the beginning of our digital transformation journey, we have prioritized the engagement of employees at all levels. That’s because we recognize that it is our people who play the most critical role in the company’s continued transformation to ensure our business sustainability.”