...engineering-and-design process takes the project from concept to the piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID), which specifies the processes and equipment required. Engineers might then go on to detailed design, or they may hand off the work to another contractor.

With a platform at sea, often the job is broken up, with one contract for the floating elements or the support to the sea floor, and another for the topside, with all the equipment to pump and process the material, as well as living quarters and protected areas in case of emergencies. “It can get quite complex, quite detailed,” says McLeod, “and then there is a general contractor in charge of fabricating that actually has to build this thing.”

There are also different contractors to install equipment and commission it, and others to certify the plant for production before turning it over to the owner, who then might turn it over to a third-party operator. “There’s lots of information that needs to be conveyed to the owner/operator. Lots of interaction and collaboration,” McLeod says.

Some issues arise as a consequence of inconsistencies between the data delivery requirements among the contracts; others arise from differences in incentives. The operator will eventually need equipment data that is of no use to the constructors, and unless the job is set up to require the data be collected as plans develop, someone has to circle back from the owner/operator side, collect it and integrate it with the operations model.

“Quite often the vendor information is missing and has to be found later, and that can be quite a pain,” says Walters. And the data often doesn’t integrate well with the construction model, either.

Even a directive to “pick up the operating manual” with a piece of equipment isn’t enough, says Walters. She gives the example of a pump specified in a P&ID by its function and duty. “When you get to the more detailed side, you realize, ‘I don’t need one pump, I need a standby pump as well, and they both need to be installed,’ ” says Walters. “And when you go to procure, you buy the one pump and the standby pump and probably a spare.

“One thing becomes three things, and you procure three pumps. When you go into operations, your main pump and standby become one pump again because the manager will run one for five hours and then the oth- er for five hours, and now they have different duties,” says Walters.

The core definition of the object changes in the life cycle. The challenge is to keep up with the shifting qualities of objects, which is one area the standards-setting bodies are concentrating on now. “You can see where the ISO 15926 standard was driven from, but the owners required a life-cycle standard for managing the information, too,” Walters says.

But at least with the potential to flow vendor data with objects into models automatically, vendors can provide that end-user information directly into the data environment as products are procured. “What has been happening,” says Walters, “is a longer-term initiative, when owner/operators want to make sure they have the information they need to start up the plant and maintain it. Quite often it has been a dump truck of information.”

But owners have gotten good at specifying what they want, and EPCs have gotten the message. They are finding ISO 15926 can be used to populate a subset of the data into the engineering data warehouse. “The business benefit is automatic handoff, saving years of engineers pouring over data,” Walters says.

With greenfield jobs, AVEVA’s McLeod says the owner/operator is schedule-driven to get the plant into operation. “It’s ‘Lets get this done as quickly as we possibly can so we can start extracting resource out of the ground,’ ” he says. With plant retrofits, however, operations, maintenance and repair are ongoing.McLeod compares it to owning a car: “It’s your responsibility to operate it safely, maintain it” and repair it.

The Piper Alpha disaster, he says, was a consequence of information and communication failure. Management on the one hand authorized a maintenance repair crew to leave a standby pump in an inoperable and potentially dangerous condition overnight, and the next shift’s operations crew was told nothing about it. A common data set and unified set of operations and maintenance procedures could have changed the outcome. “It’s about having the right information...to make a safe and proper decision,” McLeod says.

ISO 15926 has gone a long way to reduce the chances of another Piper Alpha by delivering a common nomenclature for pieces and parts of a process plant. “There are 25,000 definitions certified by the ISO standard and another 50,000 under consideration,” says McLeod. “You can take that standard and say, ‘I call things completely differently, and Intergraph and Bentley and Autodesk do as well,’ but we can all map our stuff to the ISO standard,” using the same nomenclature.

“It’s like Esperanto,” he says. “Once we have a neutral format we can go a long way.”