Improving Collaboration for Projects

Summary

BlueCielo ECM Solutions recently briefed ARC Advisory Group about the company's newly released cloud-based Meridian360 Portal.  The portal is an addition to its Meridian Suite, supporting best practices for asset lifecycle information management (ALIM), including project management and asset performance management (APM).

The portal helps assure well-managed document and information exchange among hundreds of entities throughout the extended enterprise. These can include equipment suppliers, engineering firms, and internal staff. The portal provides a secure means for authorized individuals to exchange documents and helps assure version control. Moreover, document and object relationships are maintained during the exchange, review, and reconciliation process, leading to significant time and resource savings. In summary, the Meridian360 Portal was designed to "put everyone on the same page."

Asset Lifecycle Management
Top management view industrial plants as investments that must have a return appropriate for the investment risk and support the corporate strategy. The portfolio of investments must be optimized over their lifecycles to deliver the returns investors expect. This includes minimizing project cost, maintenance cost, and industrial risk.

During the engineering and construction phase of a given industrial plant, the focus is on managing project performance. Thereafter, during the operate and maintain phase, the focus shifts to maximizing returns and minimizing costs. Within ARC's overall Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) model, the first process is project performance management (PPM), the latter asset performance management (APM). These two processes are controlled by asset and portfolio performance management. Effectively managing asset information throughout the asset lifecycle is essential to facilitate these processes. The degree to which asset information is accurate and up to date is the key metric for asset data quality and integrity. Accessible, accurate and up to date asset data has proven to:

• Reduce maintenance and contractor cost
• Reduce industrial risk and improve process safety
• Improve reliability and availability
• Improve regulatory compliance and reduce its cost

BlueCielo Meridian for Good ALIM Practices
BlueCielo's engineering information management solution, BlueCielo Meridian, can work with a variety of design authoring and asset management applications. It supports best practices for implementing asset lifecycle information management and integrates with leading line-of-business applications in the ALM landscape, such as CAD, plant and equipment design software, and popular enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions such as SAP/PM and IBM Maximo.

Meridian structures information as objects, documents, and projects and tracks the relationships between those. One of its strengths is to keep the asset-related information from different sources synchronized and consistent. Meridian is an on-premise solution, that comes in two "flavors:" Meridian Explorer for users that need to search, retrieve, or read information; and Meridian Power for users who make changes to the engineering information. Now, the addition of Meridian360 Portal provides a third flavor designed specifically to optimize collaboration with contractors during plant modification projects.

Exchanging Industrial Documentation
Asset information is created while making the asset and updated to "as-built" status when installed and during handover to asset owner-operators. Both Operations and Maintenance groups further enrich the information for their purposes during the life of the plant. In practice, information is continuously flowing in many directions, a fact that complicates change management and version control to a considerable degree. The need to collaborate with multiple parties (and often in multiple parallel projects) further complicates ALIM and change control.

Information Exchange with External Parties

Significant maintenance and improvement projects require owner-operators to collaborate with one or more tiers of contractors with whom information and documents are exchanged. Most of these contractors do not work on-site or have access to the on-premise Meridian system. As a result, documents are retrieved from Meridian, and sent to the contractor for review, completion, or other tasks. During that period, the documents are excluded from change management control. When documents are returned, they need to be verified for consistency, reconciled with other changes that may have been made to local copies, or to object items in other documents with relationships to the updated, returning document.

This process is time-consuming and error-prone. Uncontrolled file sharing typically leads to frustration about versioning, confusion about the right version to work on, and widespread need to reconcile document content by hand and determine the right attachments to email. When workers use email and free sharing utilities, the risk of cyber crime significantly increases. Associated risks include increased project duration, additional resource requirements for rework, lack of transparency, and inconsistent information that ultimately increase risk of increased cost, incidents, and damage.

Public Cloud-based Portal Streamlines Exchanges
BlueCielo recently released a public cloud-based add-on for Meridian to streamline the asset information exchange with third parties.  Authorized third parties can take advantage of the Meridian360 Portal (hosted by BlueCielo on Microsoft Azure) connected via a secure connection through the Cloud to the on-premise Meridian server located on the owner-operator's premises. This thin-client application requires no additional hardware or software.

The owner-operator can prepare a package of engineering information and documents to transfer. The contractor retrieves the documents from the portal and, after completing its tasks, uploads the new versions to the portal. Upon retrieval of the delivered work package, the system checks for matching documents, missing or changed references, and new documents to save the need for time-consuming manual checks. The owner-operator can review the received work package, compare it with previous versions and approve or reject the versions received. The combined Meridian and Meridian360 Portal solution delivers a full project performance audit trail.

Benefits

According to the company, the new solution delivers significant time gains both for the contractor and owner-operator. Fiatech, a community of capital facilities stakeholders working together to drive productivity and efficiency improvements, estimates that engineering, procurement and construction company's (EPCs) spend on average 0.3 percent on asset information handover. Fiatech also estimates that, in the worst case scenario, the owner-operator spends another 2 to 4 percent of the project cost reviewing, correcting, and entering information into its systems. Fiatech estimates that up to 60 percent of this cost can be saved by "periodic, structured, non-proprietary, automated information exchanges" between EPCs and owner-operators.

According to Fiatech, for large greenfield plants this can amount to important savings ($12 to $24 million for a $1 billion greenfield plant), and the accumulated savings over the many smaller and larger projects executed over the lifetime of the plant are just as significant. While one could argue about which fraction of this saving could potentially be attributed to a solution such as the BlueCielo Meridian Portal, even the most conservative estimation will result in a very high return on investment, extremely short payback period, and very low investment risk.

Best Documented Plant

Having a plant with 100 percent accurate documentation is the key to maximizing return on revenue-generating assets. BlueCielo has introduced an approach, called Best Documented Plant, that is specifically designed to help companies achieve this vision. According to the company, the approach leverages the strengths of the Meridian software suite within a blueprint for reduced costs, improved data integrity, and full proof of control. It includes use of Meridian360 Portal as the key to maintaining asset information quality and completeness during (concurrent) engineering change projects.

Within Best Documented Plant, BlueCielo implemented asset reference libraries by equipment class that can be populated using the ISO 15926 standard or the owner-operator's own standards. By comparing the actual equipment status against the information requirements in the libraries, the degree of compliance can be visualized and monitored. As the asset documentation becomes more complete, compliance is enhanced and proof of control becomes effortless. According to the company, the resulting benefits include high reliability, high availability, low incident and accident rates, lower maintenance costs, and reduced unplanned shutdowns, as well as core efficiency and time savings.

Conclusion
The Meridian360 Portal facilitates good ALIM practices. It streamlines the exchange of information and documents between owner-operators and multi-party stakeholders in construction, modification or modernization projects of industrial plants. Specifically, the portal:

• Brings the information exchange processes under version control
• Secures electronic exchanges
• Creates major time savings during review and reconciliation
• Improves asset data integrity and contributes to safe operation
• Brings full auditability without requiring a domain account

ARC recommends owner-operators evaluate the potential for BlueCielo Meridian with Meridian360 Portal to improve their degree of asset information integrity and create important ALIM-related savings.

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Keywords: Cloud, SaaS, Meridian, ALIM, Engineering Information Management, Exchange, Change Control, Compliance, Security, Safety, Reliability, ARC Advisory Group.