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USPI Workshop on 16 April 2024: Lessons learned from large capital projects

USPI Safari workshop

Lessons learned from large capital facility projects:
Bridging the gap between IM and the business

Introduction

Early 2023 two Safaris were held on information management of the Dutch nuclear Pallas project. It was shown how the plant information modeling was done using  international standards. These Safaris were well visited and appreciated.

On 16 Apr 2024 a Safari workshop was held on lessons learnt from doing information management of large capital facilities over their life cycle in general.

The purpose of the safari was to:

  • share lessons learned from managing information in large capital facility projects, specifically  based on using a Common Data Environment with the aim to adopt international standards
  • sound out with participants what possible follow-up we should think of. 

The purpose of the Safari was largely met, reactions were very positive.

There were about 88 participants from about 10 countries who appreciated the workshop very much. It was agreed to organize follow up workshops allowing a deep dive in the key subjects presented.

The Safari was introduced by Paul van Exel, director ISO standard of USPI.

The presentation was made by Dr. Ing. L.C. van Ruijven, a Principal Systems Engineer within Croonwolter&dros, with extensive experience in Large Capital Projects in building & construction and process industry.

Please find the presentation and recording from the Safari workshop from Leo van Ruijven at this link this link

Summary report

In his presentation Dr. van Ruijven focused on:

  1. Scope and context of information management in Large Capital Facility Projects (LCFP)
  2. Problem areas and challenges doing information management in LCF Projects
  3. Considerations with respect to an information management strategy in your LCF project
  4. Closing remarks (candidate chapters for a follow-up ‘deep dive’ safari)

Complexity and solution

The complexity over the life cycle, combining the fragmentation over the whole life cycle (“as- required”, “as-designed” and “as is”) and the huge fragmentation over the many companies involved in the project such as the client, EPC, the equipment suppliers and the software suppliers.

The challenges of resolving this enormous fragmentation having led to the introduction of the Common Data Environment (CDE) as a solution. It provides a “single point of truth” for all disciplines, enabling configuration management, Sustainable and migratable storage of project data. This supports integration of document versions, graphical models, and non-graphical data. The lack of IT tooling able to handle semantic data of LCFPs forms a big limitation to advancing information management. 

The move to advanced data management in LCFPs requires also to set requirements for skills and experience of engineers and IT experts. This will need restructuring of the way training is organized in companies. The solution adopted in several actual projects to deal with the enormous variety of models, libraries and formats offered by the suppliers to a project, has been dealt with by a cleansing methodology relating all engineering data to the CDE. This is a cumbersome exercise.

IM strategy of your company

Choices need to be made by companies doing LCFPs. Choices on data quality, semantic precision, moving to structured data, classified requirements data, choice of project partners on basis of their information maturity,  security and privacy aspects, training and skills development.

A range of data standards is available that can assist in making these choices. For example ISO 8000 brings the useful concepts of Syntactic quality, Semantic quality, and Pragmatic quality. This domain is not yet well known

Most important is the ambition level of the company defining the approach to the desired interoperability level.

Candidate chapters for a follow-up ‘deep dive’ safari workshop

  1. Partners in a project consortium all have their own methods, standards and tools
  2. Partners has different maturity in the practice of data quality and data modeling skills
  3. Contracts in many cases don’t take explicit into count data quality and data exchange
  4. The vision and support of senior management is crucial for what can be achieved
  5. Lack of integrated and data driven approach of basic project breakdown structures
  6. Lack of IT platforms and software supporting data integration based on open standards
  7. In general, within companies there is lack of knowledge of data integration standards
  8. Select data standards and chose those elements from it that works for the project
  9. It is not self-evident that the added value of a CDE is seen through engineering, maintenance and operations, mostly because of lack of pragmatic data quality
  10. Organize integration between domain knowledge, information and data structuring knowledge and IT knowledge.

Survey

As agreed during the workshop, we would issue a brief survey to sound out your preferences for follow-up deep-dive workshops into the key points made during the workshop.

We have “translated” these key points into doable joint work activities in the coming months that can be done by smaller groups of participants interested in such deep-dive workshops.

Currently we propose the following joint activities.

  1. Create an engineering data integration specification
  2. Create an information management tooling specification
  3. Create a maturity assessment specification
  4. In depth exploration of international standards for data integration into a common data environment
  5. Create specification of cleansing of engineering data
  6. Apply existing maturity model such as ISO 8000 and ORCHID partners in a project
  7. Adoption of ISO 15926-11 for integration into CDE, getting engineering data into a digital twin

Please find the link to the survey here

Please click on the link to the survey to make your preferences for the proposed joint activities known. Of course you may tick more than one joint activity.

That will help us to organized the right workshops that meet the goals of the industry.

 

Depending on the interest of the participants for join such activities, we will decided on dates and times in the coming months for the first and the second deep-dive workshop.

 

For questions please contact Leo van Ruijven via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.