PISTEP — WHYSTEP?
The Background
Companies that operate in the process industries are under ever-increasing pressure from;
• competition — the need to drive down costs
• timescales — the need to achieve results faster
• licence to operate — to show that they have the ability to manage their assets safely
These is not just the agenda of the owner/operator, it applies to the whole industry all along the whole supply chain. Increasingly it is companies’ information and knowledge assets that will differentiate the leaders from the also-rans, those that prosper from those that do not.
Emerging technologies in the management of asset information provide the means to make a company more competitive, to compress time scales and, above all, to demonstrate that the company has the ability to carry out business with the high standards expected of them by governments, communities and customers.
PISTEP is a consortium of UK companies dedicated to exploiting information management to meet these pressure. Working closely with other consortia around the world, PISTEP is leading the delivery of standards and technology to deliver the benefits.
What information are we talking about?
We are talking about all information relating to process plant assets, including information about the physical items of equipment and the information that supports all of the business processes essential to any asset’s success, such as commercial and business development, maintenance and operations, purchasing and supply chain management, drilling, facilities design and construction.
Information can exist in many forms, typically;
• textual information (such as instructions, specifications, manuals, contracts and agreements, reports)
• numeric information (such as equipment specification data, process data, corrosion readings, budget data, allocations and nominations data)
• schematic information (such as loop diagrams, P&I diagrams and business process models)
• 2D drawings (such as general arrangements, plans, elevations, well logs, well
completions)
• 3D representations (such as 3D computer models, videogrammetry, photographs and subsurface reservoir models)
The Dimensions of Asset Information
Management
There are three key dimensions to asset information management, the lifecycle, the supply chain and the management of the business as shown in Figure 2.
Managing asset information for the lifecycle
All process plants are characterised by a clear lifecycle that starts at conceptual design, goes
through project activities such as engineering design, procurement, construction and commissioning and results in an operating plant. After a number of years of service, the process plant will be decommissioned and demolished. During the operational life of the process plant, it is likely to undergo a number of re-engineering cycles, which takes us back to a new conceptual design, more engineering, procurement and construction and results in a re-vamped, commissioned plant.
Managing asset information along the supply chain
The lifecycle involves many different organisations. In addition to the Owner/Operator, there are contractors for design, construction and maintenance, equipment suppliers and perhaps process licensors and partners. Above all, there are regulators and assurance bodies.
Successful management of engineering information is vital to the whole lifecycle. Each of the parties involved needs to access and use the information using a range of application software.
Owner/Operators are custodians of the information and must be able to maintain it as an accurate reflection of the
installation. They require easy access to information to support Operations and Maintenance activities and to provide existing plant information for re-vamp work.
EPC contractors develop much of the information and need to manage and control it throughout the project so that it can be handed over to the
Owner/Operator. They require rapid and easy exchange of information with other parties such as equipment suppliers. Equipment suppliers need to be able to
Managing the business
The Lifecycle The Supply Chain
Figure 2 Process Licensor Design Contractor(s) Fabrication Contractor(s) Construction Contractor(s) Operator Partners Maintenance Contractor Government/ Regulatory Bodies Equipment Vendors Construct Operate & Maintain Revamp Design Purchase Figure 3 Requirements Requests for information Orders Design information Operating manuals Maintenance information Certification Package vendors Equipment manufacturers Parts suppliers
Asset information for managing the business
Information is the basis of decision making throughout the asset’s lifecycle. Decisions can be;
• strategic — long term decision making for the business over a period of years, for example major investment in new builds or revamps to meet changing demand or new business opportunities
• tactical — medium term decisions for the business
• day to day — typical business processes that occur every day, from changing feedstocks to initiating maintenance routines, from approving design changes to procuring new equipment
Whatever the level, decision makers need rapid access to dependable information. Furthermore, this information must be common to every decision maker, whether they are ordering new spares or planning major new
investment.
The Problems
Managing asset information for the whole lifecycle faces a number of problems. Some of them are limitations in currently available technology. Others are due to a lack of vision and getting stuck in “business as usual”.
The Document World
Today, much of the asset information is still embedded in documents. Although these documents are increasingly held electronically, they are still unstructured and the information can only be extracted by a user reading them. Generally, we employ
document management systems to manage these documents. But
this means we are only managing the documents, not the
information held within them!
Managing a large number of documents is difficult and costly, searching for information becomes increasingly difficult. Although techniques such as “free text retrieval” can be used to search a large document store, we can only use this to search for particular text strings. But you cannot use FTR to answer the questions in the box.
Information Quality
With the information held as unstructured documents, we face a major problem achieving quality. We have no way to enforce consistency between different documents that reference the same information. When we are dealing with information that is essentially numeric, this is only stored in documents as strings of text like “75-90 bar”. This means we cannot use the computer to automate data checking or to use the information in calculations. Essentially we are using computers costing thousands of dollars as expensive typewriters.
We should be using computers to ensure consistency and carry out basic validity checks, (for example is “Thursday” a valid entry for a temperature rating?). But we really want to go further an use the computer to actively search inconsistencies or design choices that are not optimal or best practise. We cannot use computers to do this unless we move beyond the typewriter philosophy.
Questions you can’t ask your document management system;
• What percentage of data sheets fields are complete?
• Do all the units of measure meet project standards?
• What size bearings should I carry in the stores, and how many of each?
• Where is pump #234-78-A installed?
• Is every item of information consistent?
• What systems have been hazoped/ completed/ commissioned?
The Meaning of the Information
Even when we do put information into databases, the meaning of the information has to be inferred by the system.
If we look at the example in Figure 5, the value 95 in the database only has meaning when the system
displays it with the added context that it is the discharge pressure of pump P-10B. If we just export the data on its own, we lose the meaning. If we want to transfer this information to another system, we need a complicated process to agree what the data means and to make sure it is handled correctly in the other system.
Data Sharing
When we come to share the data, we need to create “links” between all of the systems as shown in Figure 6. Here we are not talking about the communication infrastructure, which we assume is in place and works. What we are talking about it passing across the
information and its meaning. For each pair of system we need to map the meaning of the data as well as
transferring the data itself. Clearly the problem escalates with the number of systems.
“Not my job”
Away from the technology, there are a whole range of issues for people and business processes. Very often the lifecycle is characterised by lots of cells working in isolation, each cell being concerned with their own immediate deliverable and not caring about the lifecycle. For example, the plant designer creates and manages the information to design the plant but does not think about the needs of the operator to maintain the plant. This means that the information does not support the lifecycle in a seamless manner, Instead we go forward in a sequence of unconnected jumps, each time recreating all or part of the information.
What does this mean for the lifecycle?
What do these problems mean for the lifecycle?• When we bury information in documents, it is difficult to find
• Information held in documents cannot be processed by the computer — we just have a lot of expensive typewriters
• Delivering reliable, quality information for the lifecycle is impossible
• Information held in systems stays there, we cannot easily share it with other organisations.
95
Pump P10B
Discharge Pressure95 Bar
95
Figure 5
DESIGN OPERATION
The Costs
What this actually means for the lifecycle is extra costs.
• costs to translate files of information from one computer system to another
• costs to manage consistency between many documents and unconnected systems
• costs of mistakes from using out-of-date information
• costs of recreating information because it has either been lost or is not credible
• costs to hand information over from one organisation to another
• costs to manually re-enter information into new systems
• costs of plant operation errors due to missing information
• costs in over-design because the relevant information was not available and the designers “play safe”
The text box gives some example horror stories. There are lots more out there and everyone can probably add their own.
What’s the view from the user?
The Users’ Vision
Put bluntly, the less most users know about how their information is stored and managed the happier they are. They just want it, they want it now and they do not want to debate if it is correct or the latest version.
• Users need to be able to find information rapidly and manipulate it as needed
• Users need to carry out transactions with the information efficiently
• Users want access to shared information from wherever they or the information are located (users can be permanently or temporarily located in a variety of locations)
• Users want a single, consistent interface to find and use information
• Users want to access a consolidated information set and be unaware of where it is held or what software is used
• Users want to see information in a way that suits them and their job as well as being able to customise views
• Users need their information to be of an assured quality, so it is dependable
The Solutions
The solutions to the above problems come down to improving the way in which we manage information for the asset lifecycle. There are a number of elements to this which are described here.
Manage the data not the document
The first thing is to manage the data, not the documents.
Example Horror Stories
At the end of a project, the owner/operator asked for the P&IDs to be translated from one CAD system to another. The translation was automatic and worked well — except that all of the direction arrows on the pipework were reversed. It cost £500,000 to redraw them.
In an Australian process plant, an incident resulted in an enquiry by the government. Plant records were found to be out of date, which were a contributory factor. It cost £7.5 million to update them.
It is estimated in the oil and gas industry that 30% of problems offshore result from poor or missing information.
Information out of the design process has traditionally been delivered as documents such as equipment data sheets, P&I diagrams, etc. However, increasingly these “deliverables” are being created in computer systems that hold the information as data.
For example, take the 3D CAD model, this is a large data structure which holds information such as the identity of plant components and their dimensions in 3D space in a large database. This database is the source of both the 3D visualisation and 2D drawings such as plans, elevations and isometrics that are automatically generated from it. The database also is used to create lists such as Material Take-Offs. This example shows how the “documents” are actually a view on the data.
The same arguments apply to intelligent schematic diagrams (which hold the graphical information in a database along with additional design information about the plant equipment) and equipment databases.
Once you start managing the information as data rather than documents, benefits start to flow (see text box).
Product Data Management
Many industries are implementing Product Data Management (PDM) to manage the information about their engineering products (cars, aircraft, ships, etc.). Increasingly, PDM is transferring to the process industries to manage information about process plant assets. The key elements of PDM systems are;
• they manage information about the asset and the components of the asset
• they manage the information about the configuration of the asset
• they manage versions of information, updates to the information and approvals
• they manage workflow processes
These elements can be seen in Figure 7. Data includes equipment data, design data, inspection data, well data and graphical representations held in data form (such as a 3D model). Documents include both text documents and graphical documents (drawings).
Transactions include most business activities such as
drilling, maintenance, gas allocation, nominations and purchasing. The Configuration information tells us how all of the other information is related and how the asset is structured into units, systems, items of equipment, etc.
Workflow information helps to manage business processes
and provides the necessary controls and auditabilty. Workflow can provide templates, or “wizards”, to assist and guide users through a range of business processes, from requesting plant maintenance through to processing a purchase order. All workflow processes can be inherently
Benefits to managing the data not the documents;
• the information is easier to search using queries that can extract precisely the right information — for example using some of the queries listed above.
• computer systems can interpret the information, leading to automated quality checking — for example ensuring that all pressure and temperature ratings are consistent
• the information can more easily be shared with other systems, such as process models — for example design changes could be rapidly transferred to a process simulation model to assess the impact of any design change
• More business processes can be automated — for example creating material take-offs from the data or generating isometrics
Data Data Documents Documents ConfigurationConfiguration Transactions Workflow Assured Process Plan Change Approve Common user interface
To enable this integrated vision to work, users should be able to access information efficiently whether they are part of the asset, or whether they work for another organisation, such as a contractor or partner. Anyone who has legitimate reason to access the information should be able to, no matter who they work for or where they are located. The environment must provide security controls to prevent unauthorised access and modification, but without denying valid users the access they need.
Users should be able to carry out transactions with the information, using software applications that all use the common user interface and which share
information. The appropriate software should automatically start up to provide the user with the functionality to support the required task.
Users should not need to worry where information is held or what system controls it. They should be able to move from application to application seamlessly, driven by their business process and not constrained by the software
All transactions should be managed through a workflow system to ensure that correct business processes are followed by the correct people. This will lead to greater confidence in the information and in the business results.
We need a “drill down” through information which is held in a structured form so that there is a logical hierarchy. Users should be able to drill down different views of the same data so that they can use a method that best suits their own way of working. They may want to search by tag number (e.g. Operations), by classification (e.g. Maintenance or Operations), by physical location (e.g. Maintenance) or by schematic diagram (e.g. control engineering, well completions).
The information should be structured so that users can navigate through the information, following links as they need. For example;
• find documents and data associated with a particular tagged object or reservoir
• find information supporting a business process from association with that process
• find equipment data for an item shown in the P&I diagram
• find the location of an item in a 3D representation
• find the P&ID representation of an item in the 3D
representation
These aspects of searching and navigating information are shown in Figure 9. Maintenance Maintenance Inspection Inspection Purchasing Purchasing HSE HSE Contractor’s
Offices ProcessingTerminal Onshore Offshore
Commercial
Commercial
Nominations
Nominations
Drilling
Drilling ReservoirReservoirAnalysisAnalysis Data Store
Data Store DocumentDocumentStoreStore
Facilities
Facilities
Wells
WellsSub-surfaceSub-surface
Facilities
Facilities
Wells
WellsSub-surfaceSub-surface
Commerical Commerical Commerical Commerical Figure 8 “Example” Field Well-head platform Central Processing Platform
Gas Processing HP separation
Separator Pressure Relief System Oil system Water system
Recirculating pump P-1024A Standby pump P-1024B LP Separation Compression Train #1 Compression Train #2 -+ + + + + + -+ -+ + Pump P-1024A Pump P-1024A Equipment Compressors Pumps Centrifugal pumps P-1000A P-1000B P-1020A P-1020B P-1021 P-1022 P-1023A P-1023B P-1024A P-1024B P-1030 P-1035
Positive displacement pumps Reciprocating pumps Gear pumps + -+ -+ +
Search by System Search by Graphic Search by Equipment
Equipment design data Location on Isometric
Standards
The PDM approach is not sufficient if each company develops its own solution in isolation. As described above, conventionally information in computer systems is stored in proprietary ways so that when we extract it, it loses all of its meaning.
To enable information to be shared across organisations and systems, and to ensure that it can be managed for the entire lifecycle of process plant assets (20-50 years) we need information that;
• is independent of any one computer system
• carries its meaning with it
• is recognised and accepted through international standards
Standards are now emerging that meet these requirements.
The STandard for Exchange of Product data (STEP) has been developed as ISO 10303 to assist the
exchange of engineering information. This standard is not restricted to the process industry, but is used in many different industries from aerospace to shipbuilding.
As shown in Figure 10, STEP provides a means by which information can be exchanged between different systems. Unlike Figure 6, each system only needs to map to the standard data model. If any one system changes (e.g. is changed for a new system or is upgraded to a new version), none of the other systems should be affected.
In the process industry, a second standard is being developed, ISO 15926, by the POSC/Caesar organisation in Norway. This standard is concerned with the storage of information. It is closely linked to the STEP standard and there are common development teams.
For a fuller description of the standards and their use, see the document “A simplified guide to STEP in the process industries”.
The advantage of developing and using standards for managing the lifecycle information are;
• the standards are essentially “data-centric”, leading companies to manage the data, not the documents
• the standards give a common, neutral representation of lifecycle asset information
• information can be shared across organisations and systems
• information can be managed for the whole lifecycle, it will still be interpretable in the future
The Benefits
Significant room for improvement exists to free users from the clerical drudgery of finding and reformatting
STEP
ISO 10303
A study conducted by a major owner/operator in the oil and gas industry and a leading engineering contractor estimated that savings of up to 20% of design man-hours was possible if all members of the project had ready and rapid access to shared, credible and dependable project information. Typically the savings come from;
• avoiding time spent from hunting for information — information can be found with a few mouse clicks from the system
• avoiding time and effort in checking the validity of information — the designer does not need to worry if he has the latest version of information, from the system he will be able to get it without having to check its
authenticity
• moving information around more efficiently — especially along the supply chain
• avoiding rework costs by making changes available to the whole project instantly
• not having to re-do work that has been lost
The lifecycle of an asset is typified by a sequence of handovers of responsibility and information, for example
• from conceptual team to detailed engineering team
• from equipment supplier to purchaser
• from designer to fabricator
• from project to operator
• from operator to de-commissioning team
Each handover represents a discontinuity in the lifecycle of the information and can cost large amounts of money. Savings of more than $1 million are possible for the handover of information for a major process plant project. More importantly, by making the handover faster and seamless, it is possible to have the information ready for plant start-up, not 12 months later!
Finally, at least two studies indicate a saving of up to 3% of total lifecycle operating costs from using a structured solution to managing information.
Where are we?
As to be expected, the industry is at varying stages in improving lifecycle asset information. Some companies have not even recognised that there is something wrong which needs to be changed. Others are aware of the problems but do not know where to start. Many companies are still trying to manage the documents in the mistaken belief that they are managing the information.
Some companies, however, have taken a positive move to make a STEP-change. These companies have been early adopters of the technology and the standards. Being at the “bleeding edge” of technology clearly has its problems, but these companies have greatly enhanced their understanding of the issues and solutions. Furthermore,
significant progress has been made and benefits are starting to flow through.
Although the drive to implement new approaches has generally come from the Owner/Operators, increasingly engineering contractors who have participated in projects are realising the potential and starting to include PDM and standards in their own corporate strategies.
Due to the “demand pull” from the owner/operators and engineering contractors, software vendors have leapt to the challenge and software products are now emerging. The hard work by the early adopters is being turned into software products that can be implemented by others.
For the latest news on actual engineering projects using this technology, visit the web site of the EPISTLE Industrial User Group at http://www.stepcom.ncl.ac.uk/epistle/eiug/default.htm.
Conclusions
Managing asset information for the entire lifecycle is important to the integrity of the asset, to its business performance and to the business performance of all companies included in the supply chain.
Significant problems exist today in managing information, which is too often buried in documents.
A data-centric approach using PDM coupled with emerging ISO standards offers real benefits to the lifecycle of an asset. Some companies have taken a lead and started to realise the benefits.
