How KBR’s Technology-Led Industrial Solutions Business Works

In our first episode of 2022, host Lubna Salim speaks with Martin Simmonite, senior vice president of KBR’s Technology-Led Industrial Solutions (TLIS) business. The conversation marks the first anniversary of TLIS’s launch, and in it, Martin explains what the business is all about, with a special focus on the cutting-edge digital solutions, differentiated services and deep domain expertise his teams are delivering to customers around the world.

Transcript

IN ORBIT: A KBR PODCAST

Season 2, Episode 1

“How KBR’s Technology-Led Industrial Solutions Business Works”

INTRO

Lubna Salim

Hello, I'm Lubna.

John Arnold

And I'm John.

Lubna Salim

And this is In Orbit.

John Arnold

Hello, everyone. And welcome to a new season of the In Orbit podcast. We are so glad you're joining us today.

Lubna Salim

This is a podcast for everyone inside and outside our business that talks about what's happening around the world and in our various industries.

John Arnold

And that keeps us all connected and in each other's orbit. If you're new to the show, welcome. If you're tuning in again for this exciting second season, we are glad that you're with us. Lubna, how are you?

Lubna Salim

I'm very well. Thank you, John. How have you been? How was New Year's?

John Arnold

New Year's was great. Spent it surrounded by family and friends. Went up to Tennessee to visit them up there.

Lubna Salim

Wow.

John Arnold

Somehow managed to not get COVID-19, even though we were very safe, only did outdoor activities, so that probably had something to do with it. How about yourself?

Lubna Salim

I stayed home like a very good girl and cooked myself a nice meal and watched a movie and that's about it.

John Arnold

Very good. Excellent. I'm glad to hear that.

Well, very excited to be kicking off this second season of the In Orbit podcast with you. Before we get going on our very first episode of the new year, we want to mention that our colleague, Jo Bedford, has gone on to a different position with a different company. She'll no longer be on the show, but we wish her well and we will definitely miss her. So Jo, if you're listening, we're thinking about you and we wish you luck.

Lubna Salim

Yes, all the best, Jo.

John Arnold

But now, Lubna, we are going to be very excited to hear this interview that you conducted with Martin Simmonite, KBR's own.

Lubna Salim

Yes.

John Arnold

Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you talked with Martin about?

Lubna Salim

So John, do you know that at the Technology-Led Industrial Solutions, which we refer to as TLIS, actually went live as a formal business unit on January 1, 2021. We are kicking off the year with the anniversary, and it's a 12-month-old business. So we are kicking off the year with the anniversary of this business.

John Arnold

That's fitting.

Lubna Salim

Yeah, that's fitting. And with Martin Simmonite — I always call him “Simon-night,” but I got to know today that he is Simmonite. He has been integral to the growth of this business. I won't let the cat out of the bag. But as you will hear through the episode, you'll get a clearer picture of what exactly TLIS is. What amazing digital solutions we as KBR are offering to our clients. It's a great add-on. It's a great value-added service, as we will learn from Martin. And he has really shaped this business in a very crucial way. And it's going to play a huge role in our businesses from both, I think, the technology side, as well as the G.S. side in the years to come.

John Arnold

Excellent. Yeah, when we say “G.S.” we're referring to KBR's Government Solutions business. So it'll be very exciting to listen to this interview. We hope you all enjoy and let's get to it

TRANSITION

Lubna Salim

Today we have with us the very, very lovely Martin Simmonite, who currently serves as the senior vice president of the Technology-Led Industrial Solutions at KBR. Martin is based in our London office, and he leads the global Technology-Led Industrial Solutions business for KBR globally. The business encompasses our general maintenance and operation projects, our remote monitoring, smart maintenance and advanced process simulation solutions, utilizing big data through machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Previously Martin was the senior vice president for the [KBR] Energy Solutions business for EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] and APAC [Asia-Pacific], with responsibility for operational functions and project delivery for the London execution center, whilst providing support across the region to ensure economical but world class project delivery in all delivery centers. Services included projects from pre-feasibility through the EPCM [engineering, procurement, construction and maintenance] and ready for startup across the world and in all the business lines within the hydrocarbon sector, including LNG [liquefied natural gas], GTL [gas to liquid], upstream, downstream and midstream. Martin has over 30 years of industry experience of which the majority were in the project execution environment, where he worked as an engineer, engineering and project management before turning his attention to operations.

Martin's broad range of experience includes working across projects through FEED [front-end engineering design], detail, design and construction within the onshore and offshore environment. Having worked internationally, Martin is passionate about multicultural working and localizing businesses with global systems and capabilities. Martin has a master’s of science in project management from Aberdeen University and Higher Nationals in mechanical and production engineering.

Martin, a very warm welcome to you, and we are thrilled to have you today to introduce our listeners to KBR's Technology-Led Industrial Solutions, that combines process domain, expertise, maintenance and operations excellence within game-changing solutions. Could you please provide us with an overview of the business, Martin, and its market and the typical companies you intend to operate within? Consider me a layman and walk me through the TLIS business and these services at KBR.

Martin Simmonite

Thank you for the introduction. Technology-Led Industrial Solutions has been in operations for just over 12 months. We took a long look during the initial start of the pandemic at our business, and we looked to how we could move from the capex side of the industry through to the opex. How could we build sustainable solutions into existing assets to extend asset life cycle and improve asset performance? We have a number of long-term foundational contracts, and they are in Qatar Shell GTL, which KBR did the original engineering and P&C for. We have general maintenance services in SATORP and Sadara. And similarly, they were projects that we had front end-engineering and P&C. And we also have general maintenance services in Kwidzyn and International Papers and Svetogorsk International Papers in Poland and Russia, respectively.

That gives us a workforce of around 1,700 people. It means that we bring expertise from both maintenance and operations into the team in order to augment our digital solutions. It's a wide-ranging team of many nationalities working across many locations. And we drive world-class safety across all of those facilities in everything we do.

And we looked at those foundational contracts and we looked at how we could augment them with our digital solutions, but also looked at how we could augment them with our process, the main expertise. It's one thing in capturing data, but it's another thing in terms of understanding the data and providing an advisory service to our clients to improve asset performance.

The markets in which we intend to work are largely following our heritage and Technology business. Looking at where we have installed Technology process licenses, whether that be in ammonia, whether it be in ethylene, whether it be in refining. And we are looking at how our digital solutions, with the process expertise that we bring in both execution and in operations, to augment that data analysis to improve the asset performance.

Utopia is bringing the digital in with the general maintenance services to bring in a general maintenance services plus contract that builds out a client's operations to move more from preventative maintenance into predictive and using artificial intelligence and machine learning through the course of their operations. The other part of the business we have, which is also is an exciting part is LNG Asset Solutions. And LNG is, from our view, considered the KBR technology with the rich history we've had in LNG over many, many decades of building over 50% of the world's facilities. And we are looking at how we can bring our additional solutions, our general maintenance services, but also our LNG expertise in terms of debottlenecking projects, energy and efficiency, looking at production, “What can we do to improve production?” and, then again, obviously, looking at how from sustainability aspect we can improve the production and the energy efficiency and reduce the emissions of the existing facility.

Lubna Salim

Wow. How do these business solutions ... are these digital solutions help our clients to achieve their sustainability energy transition and net-zero targets, which are so high on the ESG [environmental, social and governance] agenda these days?

Martin Simmonite

A very good question and one that's at the forefront of really the TLIS strategy. Our digital solutions enable our customers really to perform at the peak of their plant capacity. It's about minimizing the downtime at the same time as being sustainable in energy consumption and emissions, as I mentioned previously. We have, for example, insight-based advisory advanced process control solutions and operator training solutions for our green ammonia plants. So we are driving the energy transition from the front with our solutions. And with predicting analytics, we can predict the impact on ammonia production to change it in solar and wind supply power to ensure that the maximum stability and provide differentiated cost-effective solutions to the emerging market.

In terms of the sustainability, everything we do in terms of improving asset performance provides a benefit. And we used to look at the similar metrics in terms of dollar value. If you improve production but reduce the feed stock, improve the energy efficiency, and reduce the number of unplanned shutdowns and trips, then there used to be a dollar value. But of course, all of those have an impact to the environment. If you have too many unplanned shutdowns, you need to blow down the plant, you have an energy impact, you have an emissions impact. So by improving the plant performance, you can extend the asset life cycle. You can improve production for less energy. You can reduce the emissions by removing the unplanned shutdowns. And you can remove people from the facility because you're moving towards more of a predictive environment then the preventative, which can be quite manpower intensive. All again adding to the sustainable benefits. But with the sustainable benefits comes a dollar value to the financials of the asset as well.

Lubna Salim

Lovely, lovely. We need to ensure the overall digital solutions business is resilient across both capex and opex. And in the next five to 10 years, how much growth do you expect on the opex side?

Martin Simmonite

We are looking to grow the Technology-Led Industrial Solutions business by a factor of five over the next five years. So considerable growth is our target and that's our commitment to the business. But we've already seen an increased focus from our customers in opex as a result of COVID-19. The pandemic, it naturally slowed down investment and progress in capital projects. Many were deferred, many were delayed, many were canceled. And there was an increased focus on maximizing the performance from the existing install base. When we look at the number of projects that we had in house at that time — there was BP Tortue, there was Woodside Browse. There was a large number that went into a holding pattern or actually fell off our client radar in terms of being able to make them viable through the pandemic and the drop in the oil price.

That was one of the reasons we made the strategic shift towards TLIS, and that was to capture the shift from our clients from capex into opex. So it was further augmented, and through the pandemic, and we've seen it with the likes of the Siccar Point Energy Cambo project coming under very much scrutiny with various governments in terms of, "Why do we need to keep building new facilities when we have existing that we can do more with?" The increase in demand by governments and the general population to really be more responsible custodians of the planet. There's a real drive across the world in reducing emissions. The opex budget will only increase in the next five to 10 years. We are absolutely sure of that as the pressure from stakeholders, from shareholders comes onto our clients to improve their emissions, improve their carbon footprint, do carbon-reduction initiatives. But also in terms of improving the production of the facility to enable a longer life cycle that gives a larger and greater return on investment.

To capture that we positioned TLIS and our digital business so that it can be applied both really across the capital and the operating sectors. And with our opportunities for our employees to experience both aspects of the full asset life cycle. So when we sell our new licensing technology, we're expecting to sell our digital solutions, our domain expertise, and our maintenance and operations expertise. That's for a grassroots project that will come online in the future. But equally that same client will have a current install base where we're looking to retrospectively fit the same digital solutions in order to improve the existing facilities as they live today.

Lubna Salim

Cool. KBR is part of the Amazon Web Services Energy Management Program. How do you see such alliances evolving in the future?

Martin Simmonite

That's a great question. That's one where ... we are very proud to have been awarded the Amazon Web Services Energy Management Program Certification. I think we're one of the few contractors that, or one of the only contractors out of the energy industry, that's been awarded such. And when we set up TLIS, we looked at the KBR digital solutions, we looked at our competition, we looked at the traditional software providers to the oil and gas industry. And we've established a number of strategic relationships. We've got a strategic relationship with Aviva. And we've got one with AspenTech. We've got one with SymphonyAI, and one or two others that are starting to evolve as well over recent time that will come to the fall hopefully in the not-too-distant future. And what our intent was was to be software agnostic, so that we could always go to our client with the best-in-class solution that was in fitting with their challenges, their poor performing assets, where they had problems.

We all understand that the software market in whatever industry we're in is not a one size that fits all. And there'll be something different depending on the client's needs. So we've allowed ourselves that flexibility. But in terms of the Amazon Web, we are going to be looking to work with Amazon. We're also going to be looking to work with Azure and Microsoft and others that are coming into this environment as well. But Industry 4.0 is at the exciting phase where several software and cloud players are investing really quite significant amounts of money to understand our market. But also, they're clearly seeing the value and the demand in the market for them to be able to expand and explore in terms of opportunity. And whilst we've aligned with the industry software vendors, as I mentioned before, Aviva, AspenTech, and there's PTC, who are investing to bring out strong intelligence solutions.

And we're seeing cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft, AWS, Google, and they're all developing solutions for our industrial customers. Again looking at that bottom-up where you bring in different software opportunities, built on a foundational platform, such as Microsoft or AWS, and then you can then build upwards in terms of the client needs that fit the variance of their facilities. Because remember, our clients build facilities over many decades. They all weren't built in the same generation. For example, some are 25 years old, some are 10 years old. Some are five years old and others.

But we are having, as I mentioned, the partnerships with the existing industrial software vendors and also the hyper cloud infrastructure providers to ensure that we really can bring that best in the solutions to our customers. And we are very proud, as I mentioned at the beginning, to be recognized as one of KBR’s Energy Competency Partners. And we are going to be focusing that collaboration on our sustainable solutions and as we are today, we are of one of only 32 companies recognized by Amazon worldwide.

Lubna Salim

Wow. I would expect quite a lot of competitors to take an interest. How will KBR differentiate itself from the rest of the competitors out there? And that, Martin, is my final question to you.

Martin Simmonite

Yeah, an interesting observation. What I would suggest is that we are no longer playing in a field where our traditional peers are considered competitors. When we look at the market what we are seeing are many of the big-brand consultants entering into the field of digitalization. We're seeing a large number of software providers entering into digitalization. We have something extremely unique at KBR. We have the technology process license, which gives us intellectual property protection from other people being able to open our technology, in terms of understanding the data and building the platforms. We have a unique combination, with our ability to bring in on-the-ground experience of maintenance and operations, that can enable a digital solution, that is cognizant of the challenges on the ground experienced by the people performing the maintenance. We have over 70 licensed products. So we have a very wide ranging solutions base in terms of our process license technology. We are well positioned for the energy transition with our drive towards green ammonia. And we are leading the way in terms of our partnership with Mura for the plastics recycling.

So when you look at the market, our traditional oil and gas peer competition — I'm not overly concerned about. We keep a watchful eye, but I'm not overly concerned. The Amazons, the Googles, the Microsofts is a little bit different, and we have to keep a careful watch on. And the best way we can work there is by partnering, and we then remove a competitor through partnering. And when you think about including the LNG as a technology, we probably have in the region of hundreds of current facilities that we can sell our ways to, and also many, many future facilities, as the drive towards hydrogen happens through the energy transition with the expected growth through the hydrogen market sector.

It's also been said that data is the new oil. We would like to be the customer's partner in bringing the best-in-class analytics and advisory to help achieve their top quartile business performance. If you look at what we've achieved on SATORP and Sadara, we've been able to shift our clients on that journey without the digital solutions. So by adding the digital solutions, we can take them up into the quartile in terms of overall international business performance benchmarks. But we also plan to take a look at the market and see what investments are needed as well in terms of, "Do we need to add to our portfolio?" "Do we need to add capability expertise?" "How do we transition people from our heritage business into the new business?" "How do we take the shift towards data science?" "How do we take the shift towards taking that data, building up a sort of demand that enables our clients to improve performance?” and then sharing the benefits of that advisory service as well.

For me I think it's an amazing opportunity for KBR. I think it's a really exciting market that we have. And I honestly truly believe we have a unique offering to the market that I don't believe our competition can provide. And again, look at the software providers. They don't have the rich history that we have on process domain expertise. They may have process knowledge, but not KBR process technology knowledge. And again, they won't have people on the ground with their maintenance and operations know-how combining with that expertise.

Similarly, going to our traditional competition, they won't have the broad reach, again, in terms of technology, but also the digital solutions and combining with the maintenance as well. I do believe this is a great challenge for me as an individual and as a leader of KBR. But also a great challenge to my team that I'm hugely proud of in delivering a brand-new business opportunity to KBR. But more importantly, a brand-new business opportunity that brings benefit to our clients, to the market and inevitably to how we look after our planet for the future generations as well.

Lubna Salim

Absolutely Martin. And I think we are very proud of the achievements and wish everyone all the best. I think it's a great feat to pull off during the pandemic, considering the businesses is only 12 months old. It's very commendable the kind of achievements that we've scored. But this brings me to the end of the interview, and there is a surprise rapid fire round for you.

Martin Simmonite

Okay.

Lubna Salim

Just so that people get to know Martin a little better. So, aisle seat or window?

Martin Simmonite

Aisle seat or window — always window.

Lubna Salim

Okay, and when Martin is not working he is ...?

Martin Simmonite

Cooking.

Lubna Salim

Wow. Okay. And one thing that nobody in KBR knows about you.

Martin Simmonite

Oh. One thing that nobody in KBR knows about me … I've been associated with KBR for 31 years, so there's not much that people don't know about me in KBR. But maybe a hidden secret is my passion for wildlife, especially in Africa — photography and drawing and painting wildlife as well.

Lubna Salim

Wow. Wow. That's something. And the last one is, are you binge watching something right now? If yes, then what is it?

Martin Simmonite

I've just finished a number actually, but getting ready to start the next series of “Peaky Blinders.”

Lubna Salim

Ah, nice. Lovely. This brings us to the end of our podcast and thank you so much Martin for making time for this and being with us today despite your busy schedule, and thanks a lot for enlightening us.

Martin Simmonite

It's a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to talk as well. Thank you.

TRANSITION

John Arnold

Excellent job Lubna. That was a fantastic interview.

Lubna Salim

Well, thank you, John. And I hope our listeners are going to benefit as much from listening to it. And I hope we've been able to paint a clearer picture of the Technology-Led Industrial Solutions business of KBR to everybody.

John Arnold

Absolutely. The way that the business takes KBR heritage expertise and combines it with digital solutions and our expertise in sustainable solutions sounds like a real game changer. And there's lots of potential for us to set ourselves apart. Hopefully people listening along learned a little bit more about what TLIS is, what it does. And if you know someone that would be more interested in hearing more about it, definitely direct them to this podcast and let them listen to what Martin has to say.

Lubna Salim

Until then stay safe, stay healthy and take very good care of yourself. Bye, bye.