Imass byline/Process Industry Informer/March 2008/Sue Tabbitt

Automating change
Plant designers that haven't yet turned to intelligent CAD software are shooting themselves in the foot competitively, while risking the wrath of industry regulators, warns Colin Watson of Imass

If there's one thing the plant industry could do without, it's more red tape. Already grappling with ever stricter health and safety and environmental responsibility regulations with which businesses need to comply, the industry also needs to enhance operational efficiency to maintain profits while trying to compete with cheaper, leaner production companies in emerging markets.

Clearly, cutting corners is not an option - without tight controls in place, firms risk contravening critical regulations, compromising public safety and the environment, not to mention their reputation as a business. So how do organisations hold fast to their ability to compete in the market, while ensuring they tick all the boxes for industry moderators?

A vital component of this strategy is design automation. That means not simply using computers to replicate traditional 2D drawings, but rather deploying intelligent software which turns these drawings into dynamically-linked digital information which can be changed accurately and effortlessly right across the design and production cycle, producing speed-to-market efficiencies, while ensuring accurate, comprehensive documentation exists on file for every product and component produced.
A true win-win

The beauty of this approach is that the gains are multiple - the accurate, easily traceable documentation increases the consistency, accuracy and integrity of what's produced, while speeding up time to market and pushing down costs. This keeps everyone - regulators, customers and the board directors - happy.

So-called 2D object-oriented draughting produces immediate productivity gains, enabling designers to capture rich information from the start of a project, which can then be re-used over and over again with almost no additional effort, but with a whole series of benefits.

By treating designs or components within a design as 'objects', intelligent design software can assign a full description and property information to them. This allows an early bill of materials to be generated automatically, which can be sent as a spreadsheet or text file to the purchasing department, again enhancing efficiency and accuracy in the process.

Users of Autodesk AutoCAD have benefited from these types of efficiency gains for years, because the software's main appeal is the way it turns static 2D drawings into intelligent, dynamically linked objects. This means that tweaking and adapting designs to fit new requirements, or to optimise these even further, no longer incurs delays or carries the risk of introducing errors. That's because a single change made to one aspect of a drawing now automatically ripples through related documents, where the knock-on effect on other components, materials and costings is immediately calculated. This removes costly delays from the production lifecycle, and ensures that the design's integrity is maintained at all times.

The ability to re-use proven formulae, efficiently, over and over again, is another substantial benefit, dramatically reducing the time taken to produce accurate new designs.
Accelerating everyday tasks

Where designers and draughters are able to create, modify and manage product and instrumentation diagrams with intelligent design software, they soon find that common tasks they perform every day are streamlined to boost productivity, while component and line information is available immediately, concurrently, to draughters, letting them get started without delay.

In the plant and process industry, where AutoCAD is already extremely popular, a new, specialist application is now generating a great deal of interest - AutoCAD P&ID, Autodesk's specialist solution for plant design which has particular application in piping and instrumentation design and draughting.

This comes as a breath of fresh air to plant designers who are used to the complexity of more traditional design software solutions.

Developed specifically for P&ID designers and draughters, AutoCAD P&ID enables faster and more efficient creation, manipulation, and revisions to piping and instrumentation design drawings.

Dynamic links eliminate repetition and reduce error

Features such as Dynamic Lines and Dynamic Components track asset properties and know the intent of the designer, simplifying many of the detailed tasks that drafters perform repeatedly every day.

For examples, these capabilities eliminate the need to manually break and repair lines (and then laboriously recalculate the impact on other aspects of the design), thanks to the software's intuitive grip editing and manipulation capabilities. These enable designers to simply create, move, and snap lines into place at will. Lines automatically break and attach to components as these are inserted, and are restored automatically when a component has been removed.

Designers can also move and swap in components with dynamically-linked properties and information, without the burden of having to manually edit the underlying data. This includes industry-standard symbols (such as PIP, ISA and ISO/DIN), and those that need to be customised for specific company or customer needs - all saving time and reducing the potential for errors in consistency.

Crucially, the software ensures the integrity of engineering information throughout design changes and engineering modifications, reducing the likelihood of mistakes, and keeping regulators happy.

Accurate document trails

Being able to report on all of this is a real bonus here, too. Because the software includes a versatile Data Manager, which supports in-drawing and external reports in multiple formats for easy editing, sorting, filtering, importing and exporting across an entire project, teams can have more confidence that consistent data is being used throughout, and that this is being tracked and captured not only in databases for later re-use, but is being used to produce detailed, accurate reports for the business, customers and regulators.

The Autodesk software allows data to be exported effortlessly into drawing data tables, as well as popular file formats such as Microsoft Excel, where information can be quickly sorted and organised for easy referencing and re-use.

The currency of this stored data isn't compromised as the result of any amendments to designs, either, because of the dynamic linking of one piece of data to another. Tags and annotations can be easily created and edited in industry standard formats. Information can be drag and dropped from the Data Manager and automatically resized.

Indeed, the software makes it easy to set up projects and track revisions with straightforward organisation and management of DWG files across an entire project.

Instant productivity gains

Even better, because the software has been built on the already commonly used AutoCAD platform, AutoCAD P&ID is already familiar to designers and engineers, enabling design teams to get started immediately with little or no training. As the most widely used technology in the plant industry, AutoCAD-based plant design information is everywhere.

This is particularly valuable, given today's shortage of skilled draughtspeople. Having easy-to-use, highly automated software gives firms new confidence that they can deliver consistently and to specification, while providing the audit trail of accurate, up-to-date documentation that regulators demand.

In today's climate, there simply isn't any alternative to automating plant design. The cost of non-conformity with industry specifications and regulations is vast and, if products are being shipped abroad, this is magnified many times.

In an industry accustomed to single-digit profit margins, automation presents a chance to address this challenge, while also boosting productivity, stripping out unnecessary delays and costs, and raising the bar competitively. In the pipework design and fabrication industry, it's no longer a question of whether companies embrace intelligent 2D design, but rather one of when.