As part of HxGN TV’s “Thought Leader” video series, Adrian Park, Michael Buss and Tom Szoka of Hexagon’s Process, Power & Marine business look at trends in the process industry and how Intergraph solutions can help in sectors such as water, chemicals, food and pharmaceuticals.
Owner operators and EPCs are seeing similar industry trends: the requirement to do more with less, pressures on productivity, accomplishing more in fewer hours, collaboration and reuse of data.
Park discusses the new Smart Access tool and its capabilities for owner operators. New industry trends include owners operating plants longer than initially anticipated. The new Hexagon solution allows more work to be done on the owner’s behalf. Smart Access packages solutions and services so that third-party documentation (from owners, 2D CAD files, Excel files, databases) can be assimilated, structured and made available on the cloud. This cloud-based offering reduces the hurdle of access, allowing owners to take advantage of Hexagon’s solutions.
Doing more with less can be accomplished through presenting information to users in the context of where they are working. Most owner operator personnel don’t work in engineering systems; they work in maintenance systems, control of work systems, inspection systems, etc. What Hexagon has developed allows the third-party system to access information and provide relevant data to users in the systems. People don’t have to log in to the system to access engineering documentation and information.
As noted by Szoka, the EPC world still faces the pressures of productivity, more design in fewer hours and reuse of previous efforts. Rather than look at a design on paper, users can take the data and the relationships established with these modern tools and reuse them.
As projects are getting bigger and more complex, EPCs are bringing in more contractors to spread that risk. The need to collaborate is greater than ever before. Being on the web is critical to sharing that information. Data must be shared, but the intellectual property must be kept secure. Hexagon tools are a market leader in this realm:
- SmartPlant Electrical allows users to utilise CAD drawings, bring them forward into the data-centric world, add the data and keep it forward.
- For productivity, a new version of SmartPlant Instrumentation provides the engineering data editor and query builder.
- Intergraph Smart 3D provides the ability to perform cable integration.
- Smart 3D 2016 eases data reuse.
Cloud computing is central, and there are many advantages such as avoiding handovers between different phases of the project. The cost of handing over data is eliminated totally if everyone is working in the cloud, and it handles everyone working in different standards. Working “in the cloud” doesn’t make a difference to users because they are working on a web front end. The response is the same, if not better!
Cloud is not simply for tabular data, and as Szoka points out, Smart 3D is running successfully on very large projects in the cloud. The cloud is scalable; you just pay for the resources you are using.
The process industry is going the way of the cloud. With the cloud, there is a zero footprint. You can collaborate during the design cycle, as well as during operations and management.
