Digital Twin Technology in EPC
/Bentley Systems and Siemens launched PlantSight in 2018 to enable up-to-date, as-operated digital twins. Now that the solution has been out in the real world—including through a global pandemic—engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) companies are integrating the technology into capital asset projects.
Major benefits reported relate to efficient work processes, in particular improving remote collaboration, access to a single source of up-to-date information, design reviews, data query and entry, alerts, and reporting.
The PlantSight concept was to provide a unified view into federated data from multiple sources. This view would combine engineering, design, build, construction, operations, and maintenance data, including 3D representations and quality-related data. The goal was to help clarify relationships and provide context for these data, thus making it easier for users to interpret and understand. As such, it set the foundation for creating single-source-of-truth digital twins.
ARC Advisory Group talked to three firms about their experience using PlantSight and digital twins for a 2021 white paper. These are their stories.
Counting Chickens While They Hatch
Hatch is an employee-owned consulting, engineering, and project implementation company that serves a broad range of industry sectors in metals, energy, and infrastructure. The company aims to provide increased services along the entire asset lifecycle, from engineering and operational readiness to critical asset management. Its goal is to sustain the capital investment and support operations and maintenance, data analytics, and the asset owner’s strategy.
Hatch’s clients build their business case around lower operating costs, high reliability, and uptime, all empowered by easy access to data. These selling points make digital twins an ideal fit for Hatch’s services.
The value of Hatch’s digital transformation was realized in the design and delivery of a sulfuric acid plant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Digital delivery reduced the project duration from over 12 months to just six months. This helped increase ROI by 20% by reducing CAPEX risks and enabling earlier-than-planned production.
In general, Hatch now finds it has increased quality time for engineering and reduced time spent on lower value data- and IT-related tasks. Project duration and effort are reduced and information quality and consistency increased.
The Engenium Enigma
Engenium is another EPC company, based in Australia, that strives to achieve the key values of integrity, proactivity, commitment, and excellence. Engenium provides feasibility studies, engineering design, project management, procurement and construction, and operations improvement and support services in the mining, minerals, and metals processing sector as well as in rail, ports, and other infrastructure.
Engenium saw the opportunity to provide engineers, managers, and clients with a seamless view of the latest state of project information, including the metadata behind the graphics. The company wants to provide reviews of information without multiplying systems and data, and the data must be of high quality and auditable.
One of the key benefits for engineers is having a single source of truth. They can now look for, find, or complement information without replicating it. PlantSight reduces the work related to producing and formatting reports and engineers can now find information themselves instead of waiting for information from (and interrupting) draftsmen.
Another benefit includes streamlined communication within the project teams. Where communication would previously be via email, auditable notifications are now provided inside the system and with helpful context. Communications can become very complex, especially in larger teams, so notifications reduce management cost to a considerable degree. Engenium believes that improved communications alone could recover the cost of the digital twin implementation.
Smooth NOV
NOV Inc. is a global company headquartered in Houston, Texas, that delivers technology-driven solutions to empower the global energy industry, including solutions supporting digital and smart oilfield initiatives.
In the past, NOV used Navisworks to share designs with fabricators or subcontractors. However, that created data security challenges as well as version control issues. Now, PlantSight models for a project, which are always up to date, can be easily shared with partners and locked down to control what a partner or client can see. And personnel can work simultaneously on a single, large design and are immediately notified when clashes are detected.
Design review efficiency is a substantial benefit. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the case for digital twins became even more convincing, as all project team members could contribute from their homes while working on shared design information. It also greatly helped the collaboration with fabricators that NOV could no longer visit in person since the start of the pandemic.
With the PlantSight service, NOV keeps information in one place and controls it in a single environment. For example, 3D design information, the attributes of piping specification, and installation notes for the piping are all visible and manageable from within PlantSight. Previously, if a piping manager wanted a piping layout report, they had to involve a piping designer. Now, the piping manager can use self-service dashboards and reports.
Cloud-based digital twins can quickly demonstrate the benefits of combining engineering, design, build, construction, operations, and maintenance data, including 3D representations and quality-related data.
These three enterprises have already gained the benefits of remote and collaborative digital twin implementation. They’ve been able to improve their designs and resolve any issues and potential clashes early in the design phase, so they don’t become expensive problems in the construction or operational phase.
EPC companies implementing digital twins have a new twin(kle) in their eyes.
