Energy Engineers Are Stuck in Excel
The ”Added Context” series distills Bolo Founder and CEO Diti Sood’s perspectives on AI, operations, and the future of heavy industry from articles published in Medium. This installment draws from "The Energy Industry Runs on Excel. Here's What That's Really Costing Us."
Energy engineers pull data from process historians, quality servers, and asset management platforms into spreadsheets to figure out which assets need attention. Bolo lets engineers ask that question directly, in natural language, and across an entire fleet.
Systems of record like SAP, process historians, and quality servers capture and store data reliably, but they can’t give engineers a complete view of the field. The problem is the systems don’t talk to one another. To pull together all the information needed to plan and make critical decisions, engineers spend hours manually transferring data from these systems and compiling them in massive spreadsheets.
Much of the software engineers rely on was built to document and store data that meets compliance requirements and supports meticulous record-keeping. But those records are largely inaccessible for use in the work engineers are actually doing. And with software that has overwhelmingly remained unchanged over the past 15 years, you have mission-critical enterprise systems connected by nothing more than a spreadsheet.
With thousands of assets to track, engineers can only realistically investigate the assets with known issues. The massive amounts of data to manually work through means it’s often too difficult to catch problems before they escalate. Without a way to check the health of the whole fleet at once, an issue can sit buried in data, undetected unless an engineer has the time to check every asset, one at a time.
One Bolo engagement for a Fortune 500 utility highlights this problem acutely. A single query to surface acetylene spikes across their transformer fleet flagged 16 transformers with elevation, including one with dangerously high levels. An engineer called for an emergency oil sample and pulled that transformer from service the same afternoon. Asked how they would have found the issue otherwise, the utility's answer was direct: it would have been almost impossible.
The work to dig through spreadsheet data and confirm real numbers in the field takes time most engineers can’t spare. Instead of verified data for every asset, teams have to plan around guesswork.
Engineers across utilities, chemicals, and oil and gas report spending 60% to 75% of their week on administrative work. Instead of actually engineering, they’re pulling exports, reconciling systems that don't communicate with each other, and writing compliance reports.
But with full fleet visibility and instantaneous insights, reports that were occasionally run once a quarter can be automated to run daily, and problems that used to surface only after they'd already failed get caught at the first sign of trouble.
Freed from that administrative load, engineers can put their attention back on the expertise no one else in the organization has: spotting a chronic failure pattern before it repeats or catching a failing asset before it goes down. Plans can be grounded in real data, and critical infrastructure can run smoothly.
Explore what the energy industry’s reliance on spreadsheets reveals about the gap between the systems that store operational data and the people responsible for acting on it.