Collaborating to compete

Vast amounts of information are generated during the design of offshore facilities; information that is used for downstream activities of construction, commissioning, operations and maintenance.

Managing these data, and ensuring that their quality remains high, is a vital task for companies like Vetco Aibel. Formerly part of ABB's upstream oil and gas activities, Vetco Aibel provides project management, engineering, procurement and construction services to the upstream oil and gas industry.

Historically, Vetco Aibel has managed the information from its projects using in-house developed engineering information systems. It has made good progress via this route, but the company now believes that in order to build on that success, it must innovate.

The industry has been grappling with the control and profitability of major fixed lump sum projects for some time, but smaller projects related to modifications of existing facilities may also be challenging.

But in these situations, the use of proprietary IT systems may not be an advantage. Although companies consider their in-house developed systems to be a competitive asset, they often make it more difficult to work collaboratively with the owner operator and other project contractors.

In Vetco Aibel's case, the company believes that it will derive much greater benefit - and therefore a higher return on investment - from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems.

COTS engineering systems can actually lower the cost of a project - making the EPC's pricing more competitive, and therefore more attractive to the owner-operator.

Vetco Aibel's approach contrasts with the current industry position where (typically) the owner-operator and EPC systems interface to support an engineering project. The new approach involves sharing engineering data openly with the client and extended supply chain, for the benefit of the project, and the industry as a whole.

This standards-based, information-centric strategy clearly demands a more collaborative approach from both EPCs and owner operators, but the rewards make this worthwhile. The success of packages like Microsoft Word, whose documents can today be used by almost anyone, anywhere, illustrates this point. Similarly, using COTS systems will allow EPCs to take engineering information from any company, anywhere in the world, add value to it, use it concurrently ensuring changes are managed and communicated, and perform downstream activities on the evolving information store.

However, to achieve this, Vetco Aibel needed to forge a strategic partnership with a global engineering IT company, rather than the traditional client-vendor relationship, and make this a key part of its business infrastructure. It chose Intergraph Process Power & Marine, which it believes shares its vision and commitment to industry innovation.

Research carried out on behalf of Intergraph by Coopers & Lybrand proves the case for Vetco Aibel's strategy, revealing that engineering information handling and processing accounts for a significant percentage of the industry's capital and operating expense - and that over half of an engineer's time is spent looking for information or documents.

Research shows that the ability to re-use data from project to project can provide significant savings in capital expenditure and achieve faster design execution. For new projects the data-centric management of plant and project information can cut the cost of concept development by up to 30%, while engineering efficiency savings of as much as 28% are possible. Savings in commissioning of up to 60% can also be achieved. Also, the cost of the IT that helps to make this possible can be up to 30% cheaper.

Additional benefits are available for the owner-operator in the downstream commissioning, operations and maintenance activities by delivery of the 'as- built' information for use in the follow-on stages — also helping to reduce handover costs.

For a commercial solution to enable results of this kind it should be flexible: easily configured to optimise work processes for EPC businesses, adaptable to integrate the supply chain, and powerful enough to meet the owner's operational needs.

In implementing its new business model - centred on the plant life cycle, project data and the people that use it - Vetco Aibel is migrating its engineering data from its existing proprietary information management environment to one provided by Intergraph, in which engineering information will be stored in industry standard formats that can be more easily shared by the owner-operator, EPC and other contractors and extended supply chain in any project.

Vetco Aibel's new engineering management strategy is based on a combination of Intergraph's SmartPlant Foundation engineering data management and the Engineering Framework, Intergraph's integration platform for the process industries. This infrastructure will integrate engineering disciplines and work processes, and their interactions with other business systems, including materials management and procurement.

The effect will be to create a single integrated lifecycle information system, based on industry standards, that will help the company to meet customer demand for faster project delivery plus operations and maintenance support, at lower cost.

The Intergraph / Vetco Aibel partnership is in its early phases. Vetco Aibel is putting in place a long term plan to transition from their in-house solution to the COTS environment. Existing projects will stay on the current systems. Business processes will be analysed, and the new solution will be gradually introduced on prioritised new project activities. In the meantime Intergraph has taken on support of existing systems.

To make the best use of plant information Vetco Aibel realises that it must know how, where, why and which business processes use that information - challenging traditional approaches in order to improve communications and obtain benefits across the supply chain. Managing consistency of information is fundamental, as engineers need to be confident that project information is as accurate and reliable as possible.

For Vetco Aibel, during the dynamic engineering project phases when information creation and change are high, information generated by intelligent rules-based engineering applications will be captured, managed and shared across the Intergraph framework.

Controlling the changes that occur during projects is a critical factor for EPC companies. Industry research shows that a significant proportion of this change or re-work stems from errors caused by usage of inaccurate and unreliable information. The Intergraph repository, which is dynamically managing the sharing of information across project disciplines and project parties, will ensure that Vetco Aibel's globally dispersed teams can rely on information integrity, so reducing the risk of increased costs and project delays.

Vetco Aibel expects an initial 500 engineers to be using the Intergraph system, and is currently defining the work processes that it will support. Ensuring the efficient exchange of data between disciplines, and with external partners, is a priority.

Everything from process, instrumentation and telecommunications, to structural engineering and P&ID is being reviewed and streamlined. Vetco Aibel will now be able to drive its work processes electronically, using technologies including email, in-built audit tracking to monitor what went where and why, and management reporting to track progress and completion.

Trond Bynes is v-p for operations and facilities at Vetco Aibel, and Lars Line Vaaland is information systems manager.