A white paper ‘Making Data Real’ authored by the ARC Advisory Group, on behalf of Aveva and Mustang Engineering, discusses managing information across the asset lifecycle—and across ‘handover,’ when the engineering contractor passes a new facility to its owners.
For ARC, information is deemed a ‘quintessential’ part of the Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) process. For engineering companies like Mustang, IM is critical for a successful business. But the same processes and tools have the potential to provide ALM benefits beyond handover, to an owner operator.
Mustang’s project information management unit supports six business units and 14 locations around the world. In the old days, project information management (PIM) consisted primarily of engineering document control. Handover was a ‘loosely defined’ workflow with data ‘buried in hundreds of hard-copy vendor books and technical documents.’ Following handover, owner-operators had to ‘mine’ information manually from documents and drawings to populate operations databases—an inefficient and error-prone process.
Today, EPCs and owner-operators have sophisticated database applications to generate and manage their information—but this actually adds complexity to data handover. Electronic data introduces compatibility issues between different systems, requiring data reconciliation across engineering data management systems and taxonomies—a challenging process.
Consequently, Mustang was looking for a data management system that could provide a master tag and document register for use by its own engineering groups and its owner-operator clients.
Following a proof of concept trial, Mustang chose Aveva Net as its IM platform because it was application neutral, scalable and promised improved future ALM workflows.
Mustang reports a significant improvement in the handover process. Instead of the traditional end-of-project ‘big bang,’ handover is a continual process throughout the design phase. Mustang’s engineers can start populating the commissioning database immediately after front end engineering design (FEED) and the initial handover of the instrumentation database to the client’s automation business unit. The progressive approach improves the timeframe required for operational readiness, an important milestone for project owners.
One critical Aveva Net capability is highlighting data gaps. These include items that are shown on an engineering diagram but which have not yet been created in the 3-D model, or where there is a failure to comply with client handover specifications. The toolset’s ability to associate tagged objects and their documents provides insights into the cascading effect of a change. The new solution is described by ARC as ‘a quantum improvement in data quality and project execution.’ The full report is available from arcweb.com.
This article originally appeared in Oil IT Journal 2010 Issue # 2.
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