The Engineering information systems

Engineering departments work on industrial plants when they are being created, modified or extended, on greenfield or existing sites. To carry out their missions, these Engineering Departments provide a wide range of services including analysis, simulation, design, equipment procurement and construction, for which they use numerous software solutions.

Over the years, these software solutions have been enhanced with new features. For the most part, they have achieved a good level of performance. However, their ability to respond effectively to users' "business" needs is no longer the only criterion for their use within industrial site project management processes.

Engineering software solutions must be able to communicate with each other and with the flow of information generated by the project. Interruptions and inconsistencies in this flow of information are in fact sources of unjustified time spent, non-conformities, errors and delays for the project.

Information flows are built around data and software, including graphics software, which must fit into this flow and manage technical data. As a result, graphic representation has become just one of the many ways of representing data, with the plan being the result of extraction and formatting from databases.

During the course of the project, Engineering builds a true digital model that reflects the "physical" world. This digital model, used during the site's operational phase, must not be a partial and approximate reflection of the physical world, but must conform to it.

The fundamental objectives of those involved in the industrial site project are, firstly, to ensure that production starts on time, on budget and to the quality expected, and, for the Engineers, to implement a transfer of "As-Built" information to the Operators that is sufficiently complete and accurate to enable operations and maintenance to run smoothly throughout the life of the site.

The efficient management of technical information on a site and its assets is crucial to the site's safety and profitability. The operators of industrial sites, Engineering's customers, need this digital model to feed their own information systems, without re-entering or modifying data.

Operators are therefore required to specify the information they need, its nature, type and format, and to validate it before integrating it into their own systems.

Engineering information systems and their software solutions are therefore undergoing a fundamental evolution, characterized by a migration to data management, the integration of this data into a project flow, and the integration of the Operator into this flow. The Operator...