Kate Allen on Overhauling the Asset Inspection Process with Digital Technologies
Channel: Digital Oil and Gas
Date: 22/04/2023

GUEST BIO

Kate Allen is the Product Manager, PetroChemical Division for Tru Solutions, a company that provides quality assurance software for industrial companies. Kate describes herself as ‘a wife, mother, and Petrochemical Product Manager from St. Louis, MO.’  Kate began her career in software over 20 years ago (eeeeek!) with a small, local start-up serving the third party recruiting market.  Since then, she has worked in a variety of industries across various platforms helping clients standardize processes, improve efficiency, and leverage data for decision making. When she's not visiting the nation's finest refineries, you can find her screaming from the sidelines at a youth sports match, or perfecting her sourdough recipe. 

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Kate Allen, who is the Product Manager, PetroChemical Division for TruSolutions. Kate’s team focuses on supporting both third party and owner/operator inspections of industrial equipment, which historically has been a pen and paper process, with lots of manual reports. But in the face of staffing shortages, new tech savvy employees, and the pending retirement of aging experts, companies are transforming their inspections practices and technologies, and gaining important strategic benefits alongside proven ROI. 
Here are some of the key questions addressed in the episode: 

What is your background?
Why are third party inspections undergoing transformation?
What kinds of inspections are being overhauled through technology?
What is the actual work of the inspector and how is it changing and adapting?
How does digitizing inspections help with improving data quality?
How does inspection data inform asset strategy?
How are you dealing with obstacles, resistance to change and objections to your solution?
Where do you see untapped potential in oil and gas for further productivity or cost gains driven by digital? 
What lessons have you taken away from your experience? 
Any advice you can share

QUOTABLE QUOTES 

I started primarily in industrial coatings and had never painted anything other than a canvas in my life, there was definitely a learning curve there.

The kind of customer centric focus, despite the industries being so different, [means] that the customer has a need for an easy to use interface and fully supported software as a service that has no downtime, because the people have no downtime either.

Third parties are being asked to provide the same number of inspections with a significant shortage in staffing who are qualified to do so. Both industries are facing this kind of the great changeover with all of their subject matter experts heading towards retirement age.

There's a lot of knowledge that is just baked in to the app, not only in stepping the inspectors through the process, but also once they're in the swing of things, flagging things that are out of spec conditions, or bringing things to the forefront that engineering needs to call out to mitigate risk, or develop, you know, a strategy for an asset.

Compliance and safety are a byproduct of conducting your inspections correctly.

The best inspectors are not often the best report writers, because that's not their job. That's not what they're trained to do.

We are standardizing data capture. So I think that is something that is really oftentimes overlooked.

We can now aggregate that data across all of our sites globally, and see exactly the number of occurrences we've had of this particular issue on this particular asset type and this particular type of environment and make really, really great data driven business decisions about asset strategy.

If you're not capturing your data digitally now, like how do you think you're gonna throw it into this awesome 3d modeling of your entire refinery,

CONTACTING THE GUEST

Kate Allen 
kate@trusolutions.com

USEFUL LINKS

LinkedIn profiles (personal, business): 
Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-allen-57601061/
Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tru-solutions-digital/mycompany/
Website: 
 https://trusolutions.com/solutions/api/

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