Reduce costs and speed up processes for power plant construction projects

Contact Open Text | OTResources@opentext.com 

Power Plant Construction Projects produce a huge volume of information and documentation throughout their execution, from building the investment case to the post construction handover of critical drawings, procedures and plant maintenance information. Energy Companies have to efficiently manage an overwhelming volume of information and work processes over the entire lifecycle of their plant to control costs, meet project deadlines, fulfill regulations, and increase quality. So it’s not surprising that up to three percent of the total investment can be saved and the project risk significantly reduced through the use of enterprise content management (ECM) software, not just to record knowledge but to maintain and share it through the organization in the design and construction phase to the operations and maintenance phase.

So it makes sense for managers and leaders of such projects to ask some serious questions: How big of a factor is teamwork, collaboration, expertise and keeping documentation when making successful investment and critical design decisions in your organization? How much money was lost in your last project due to the inability to more effectively manage the overwhelming volume of information in the construction phase of your project? Can you do more to efficiently manage the overwhelming volume of documentation and work processes in design and build, and handover to operations and maintenance in order to control costs, maximize production, and boost quality? Many Energy companies have already realized the benefits of Enterprise Content Management, can you afford not to?

.. from construction to production

It’s a familiar story for Power Plant Construction Projects. A huge organization is built to deliver an asset; it starts with the Management Team, extends into the EPC houses for most of the design engineering, then there’s the internal engineering group, the Supply Chain organization, the Ready for Operations group, Instrumentation and Process Control, the list goes on and on. Much of the project organization is only transitionary in nature – many employees and lots of contractors - and all too quickly they move onto the next project. Right along with them goes their plant knowledge and experience. We certainly can’t keep their experience but we try to capture as much knowledge as possible: The project leaves artifacts – documents – design specifications, engineering drawings, vendor prints, Management Of Change documentation, transmittals, contracts, timesheets, invoices, material lists, operations procedures, maintenance notes… The list goes on and on.

Traditionally, at the end of a capital project, the EPC was happy to hand over volumes of documentation over to the asset owner. Hand over was literally like getting the dump truck to back up and drop tons and tons of paper onto the owners property. The question today is how to better manage, organize and store all this information?

Open Text Solutions for Utilities meets these needs. Whether they are requirements to store and organize regulatory documents or paper copies of the originals using the Open Text Records Management solution. Or the Open Text engineering support solutions are needed to handle all Controlled Engineering Records for numbering, revisioning and versioning and it is needed to be integrated with a Transmittals Management product. A Contracts Management solution is also available to deliver critical documents in standardized formats with the least amount of review and approval from busy legal staff.  An Invoice management solution enables the owner to better manage supplier and contractor costs. Exchanging information between the plant owner and the contractor is continuous in the project. Open Text allows staff to easily retain e-mail in the project ECM system through simple drag and drop features. Document markup and red-lining is available on-line for internal and intra-company collaboration. As information quality goes up and more accurate information is distributed, project schedule is positively impacted, delays are avoided, rework goes down, as do project costs.

.. to operations and maintenance

Once the capital project is complete, the operations and maintenance phase of the asset lifecycle begins. Safety is paramount and keeping information on the asset accurate and up to date is critical in eliminating incorrect data as a problem in the chain of events that lead to an injury or fatality. Achieving high reliability and maximum throughput from the plant requires a deep understanding of the components, detailed information about the asset and its capabilities, an optimum maintenance schedule and its operational limits. Finding this key information depends on the organization’s ability to collect, manage and control content. Open Text solutions help manage and control changes to startup and shutdown procedures, safe operations procedures, and maintenance work packages.

With so much information and so many critical work processes, an organization requires an army of personnel to properly manage the content associated with an asset unless they deploy a quality software system to help manage asset information.

As an example, Engineers that have to improve or address issues with an asset have taken many physical documents with them to the field. With our mobile Engineer solution, all needed information like: working procedures, maintenance / repair orders, SOP, CAD drawings, GIS information, etc. can be downloaded on a notebook to a “digital process folder”. The Engineer completes his task and adds information: CAD notes, potential safety hazards, practical and impractical changes, etc. in the “digital process folder”.  On returning to the office this information will be synchronized with the Enterprise Content Management system, modify technical data in SAP PM and update the process workflow state in the maintenance reporting system.

The Open Text Enterprise Content Management platform is the ideal repository for information such as the Operations and Maintenance procedures.  Business processes can be placed in workflows to ensure that these procedures are reviewed regularly and only changed with appropriate approval. The solution for Controlled Engineering Records can allow all users to find and review these critical documents while maintaining business controls that only allow modifications by approved projects. Shutdown and turnaround plans and documentation can be stored in a central repository for knowledge retention and reuse. Investigations into injuries, production loss and environmental exceedences can be centrally available to address patterns and trends to improve operational effectiveness. Additional modules such as our Extended ECM for SAP can imbed the documentation (Procedures, Lessons Learned, Field Level Risk Assessments, Material Safety Data Sheets) with inspection and maintenance activities in SAP to simplify access to information for staff and reaching 100% compliance to policy and procedures.