There were a reported 120 participants in the first post-covid face-to-face (F2F) meeting, hosted by Equinor in Stavanger, of Cfihos, the capital facilities information handover specification. Cfihos is currently managed by the UK-based IOGP as Joint Industry Project 36. At its inception, in 2012, the early hopes for Cfihos were for a ‘lightweight mapping [of engineering information] with a realistic amount of work’. Earlier attempts at standardizing plant information (ISO 15926 and Fiatech/Jord) were not widely implemented. Ten years on, is Cfihos succeeding where these initiatives failed?
Participation in the 2022 F2F suggests renewed interest in Cfihos. This appears to be coalescing on the deliverables to date which comprise a suite of interlocking Excel spreadsheet definitions. A parallel deliverable is the Cfihos relational model (currently at V1.5), described in an 84 page PowerPoint presentation. This currently represents a ‘logical’ model, physical implementation to a database is being outsourced. Based on the little information released from the F2F, it would appear that a ‘lightweight’ model remains elusive.
Cfihos was also highlighted in a joint presentation at the Aveva World conference by Erin Jones (ExxonMobil) and Peter Townson, (IOGP JIP36/Cfihos). The presentation, ‘a Practical implementation of Cfihos to meet data surveillance needs in the energy industry’ addressed ‘inconsistent data across the suite of design tools applied by your engineering- procurement-construction (EPC) firm.’ Cfihos was reported as creating consistency and interoperability in ExxonMobil’s equipment data. ExxonMobil is playing catch up here, ‘our competitors have been leveraging a data centric approach for years’. Shell initiated the Cfihos initiative back in 2012, donating its in-house work to USPI-NL. For ExxonMobil, Cfihos’s main contribution stems from its common language that ‘elevates’ existing information EPC systems from traditional PDF documents to ‘true data’, captured in ExxonMobil’s ‘RED’ (repository for engineering data) application, an implementation of Aveva AIM & ISM*. RED ‘enables data centric engineering surveillance, improve data handover to operations, and build an engineering data foundation to allow for global asset analytics’.
In a short email exchange, Jones added, ‘The relationship between
Cfihos and RED has allowed us to solve the business problem we were
experiencing. We were getting data from our contractors but it was not
standardized in a meaningful way so it was difficult for us to perform
any kind of surveillance other than with lots of human intervention. By
implementing an industry standard which specified the data that we
wanted, we were able to implement a more automated approach to
surveillance through AIM & ISM. I suppose we could have established
a bespoke ExxonMobil standard to accomplish similar consistency but
we’re trying hard to leverage pre-existing standards and minimize
creating our own answers where there is industry consensus on things
like a data standard’.
* Asset Information Management and Aveva Information Standards Manager that uses ‘industry-standard templates such as CFIHOS’.
Cfihos is planning a version 2.0 for Q3 2023 More (but not much more) from the JIP 36 home page.
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