Trinity Technologies - News - Creating a Plant Information Asset® New Assets for a Growing Industry

Creating a Plant Information Asset® New Assets for a Growing Industry

By Joe Morray

With the growth in power generation design and construction activities, as well as the added importance of maximizing the reliability and output of existing power generation facilities, we see the continued need to create and maintain reliable information sources for operations, maintenance, and retrofitting. This confluence of traditional physical design and schematic data, operations simulation systems, regulatory data, and mechanical reliability information we refer to at Trinity Technologies as creating the Plant Information Asset®.

We established this term to highlight the fact that it is truly an asset of a corporation, requiring both investment and financial returns associated with its use. We need to see beyond the individual elements of corporate information (applications and data), and understand and demand that it becomes an integral player for maximizing the output of the corresponding physical assets (the plants and systems).

Functionally, the Plant Information Asset needs provide a complete environment for the storage, searching, retrieval, and change management control of the plant data and documents. The objective is the ability to provide, for a single component, a full 360 degree view of the information, regardless of the discipline for its particular lifecycle state. Some of the functions that the Plant Information Asset provides to support the lifecycle of a facility include:

Item/component management: Capture, management, revision control, and archiving of components and systems, including all data related to component id’s, manufacturer, rating, installation dates, etc.

Document management: Capture, management, revision control, distribution, and archiving of drawings, procedures, correspondence, licensing documentation, vendors manuals, and commitment documents.
Records management: Including the management of all appropriate documents according to disposition rules, providing search capabilities (both attribute and text-based, security against change, disposition cycles, and the ability to off-load to peripheral devices if desired.
Selection of the right technology is a key factor in the successful deployment of the system. It is imperative that the selected technologies meet several criteria:
Commercially available products from companies with proven performance records;
Ability to meet the majority of the configuration management requirements with out-of-the-box functionality;
Flexibility for configuration and customization to fully address all utility requirements;
Scalability to meet future enhancement requirements and support a large number of users.
So as the industry continues to grow through the delivery of fit-for-purpose generating assets, let’s make sure that we equally invest in the creation of fit-for-purpose Information Assets.

Joe Morray is president of Trinity Technologies Corp., process and power industries consulting firm that helps owner/operators and EPC firms succeed in the use of information systems. The company specializes in driving companies to align work processes, technology, and organizational change requirements for the plant environment.