The articles cover the motivation for doing as they did, and where their main focus was put in order to achieve their goals.
In this series I use my information structure map, or the “circle of life” as a client jokingly called it, to explain where the different companies put their focus in terms of information management and why.
This is by no means a unique situation as many EPC’s were forced to build such hubs in the late nineties for consolidation and control of multidiscipline plant information since no software vendor at the time could support their needs.
Secondly it was considered crucial to enable standardization and re-use of previously delivered designs and engineering data.
A huge effort was put on building reference data for sharing and alignment across plant engineering disciplines, procurement and ultimately client handover of Documentation For Installation & Operations (DFI/DFO). An ISO 15926 ontology was put in place for this purpose.
The main reason for enabling standardization and re-use of engineering data however, was to reduce the gigantic number of engineering hours that were spent in the early phases of each project delivery. Especially during the FEED phase (Front End Engineering and Design). Another important reason was to connect engineering with procurement and the wider supply chain more seamlessly.
Extensive analysis of previously executed projects revealed that even if the EPC had a lot of engineering concepts and data that could be re-used across projects, they more often than not created everything from scratch in the next project. In order to capitalize on and manage the collective know-how of the organization, the re-usable design structures received a lot of focus.
EPC 1 also faced different requirements from operators with respect to use of tagging standards depending on what parts of the world they delivered projects to, so as a consequence, multiple tagging standards needed to be supported. It was decided that no matter what format the operator wanted to receive, all tags in all projects would be governed by an internal “master-tag” in the EPC’s own system while communicated to the customer in their specified format.
The third focus area was an extensive part (or article) library with internal part numbers and characteristics showing what kind of products could fulfill the tag requirements in the functional structure. Each part was then linked via a relationship to objects representing preferred suppliers of that product in different regions of the world. This concept greatly aided engineering procurement when performing Material Take-Off (MTO) since each tag would be linked to a part where preferred supplier could be selected.
The third delivery in the project centered around delivering the capabilities to create and use the different plant engineering structures (functional structure, tags, with connected parts where both entities used the same reference data )
An overview explaining the different structures can be found in the article:
Plant Information Management - Information Structures, and further details regarding each information structure are discussed in:
Plant Engineering meets Product Engineering in capital projects
Handover to logistics and supply chain in capital projects
Plant Information Management - Installation and Commissioning
Plant Information Management – Operations and Maintenance
Bjorn Fidjeland
The header image used in this post is by Viacheslav Iacobchuk and purchased at dreamstime.com