Speaking at the 2013 management board meeting of USPI-NL the Dutch plant and process industry standards body in Amersfoort earlier this year, Jason Roberts, (Shell) and Joep Mintjens (PLM Consultancy) provided a progress report on the capital facilities information handover specification (Cfihos) project that kicked-off last year. Cfihos will help owner operators specify engineering information required for future operations and maintenance and will establish a de-facto industry standard that is to form the basis of a new ISO standard.
The requirement for improved information management in engineering projects is very well illustrated by the following statistic from the Cfihos project. When the Kashagan Phase II project kicked-off, the number of process tags was estimated at 50,000 and the number of engineering documents put at 15,000. In the event when the mega project was finally handed over, it involved around a million tags plus a million documents!
Mintjens set out the Cfihos project deliverables as a handover specification for the process industry comprising a specification document, a reference data library (RDL) along with tools for owner operators to create their own requirements documentation. The standard is set to be de facto in 2013 and to align with international standards in 2014. The standard does not appear to provide standard content but rather a structure for engineering information derived from Shell’s internal standards.
In a remote presentation, Roberts stated that Shell has put a lot of effort into standardization to drive costs down. By making the Cfihos material available to the wider community, Shell hopes to ‘convince others of the value.’ Cfihos is based on existing discipline standards content such as ISO 13706 (for air cooled heat exchangers). This like others comes in a data sheet format and should not be reinvented.
Alignment with ISO 15926 parts 2, 4 & 11 is seen as desirable but there are lots of gaps, especially in Part 4. Here Cfihos takes the Shell RDL as starting point, the fruit of 10 years of work, and makes it more generic and less Shell specific. Part of the process is to identify where information is lacking and to submit change requests to ISO.
A similarly pragmatic approach is taken for documents. What exactly is required, should a P&ID sheet be translated? Is a hard copy required? And in what format and at what security level? A demo showed a practical example of generating a new information specification using a shopping cart metaphor as used in Shell’s internal engineering information specification (EIS) engineering design tool. This allows for exhaustive search of what specs are already in use and if a new spec is needed, it can be in a compliant fashion. The system is used to generate contract documents from cloned templates showing what goes out to a contractor and what Shell expects back. Actual documents may be in Excel or a ‘contract ready’ Word document ‘100% aligned with EIS.’ The system also generates mappings for Shell’s data loading and QC tool ‘IDB.’ Visit USPI-NL and the Cfihos home page.
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