Equipmnent Manufacturer Case Study #1

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Contents

1. Company Description
2. Buisness Case
   1. Step One: Examine the System Landscape
   2. Step Two: Map Internal Terms to ISO 15926
   3. Step Three: Pilot Study
   4. Step Four: Production
3. Significance of this Project to ISO 15926
4. Project Execution
   1. Resources
   2. Training Required

Company Description

This Company (The Company) is one of the world's largest suppliers of industrial instruments. It owns several international brands of industrial measurement and control equipment. In addition it provides software and services to optimize the return from plant assets.

In 2008, The Company launched an internal project to implement ISO 15926. When the project is finished, The Company will be able to communicate directly with the engineering and asset management systems of any customer who uses ISO 15926-enabled tools.

Buisness Case

Summary: To make the exchange of information about complex plant instrumentation and services trivial.

At the beginning of a project, a large effort is required to simply agree on terms. The first task of a sales engineer is to read the customer's data sheets and specifications and recommend a model number. But despite many years of experience in the industry, it seems that there is always ambiguity. This is true regardless of how sophisticated the customer is, or whether the customer is an EPC or Owner. Even for seemingly simple instruments, there still needs to be discussion about terms and the number of properties to define.

One would think that experienced instrumentation engineers would have solved this. For instance, in North America we have the Instrument Society of America, which publishes recommended data sheets for almost every kind of instrument that exists. Other countries have similar standards. But most engineers and owners have particular needs that require tweaking the standards. And no one wants to deliver a product and find out that certain terms have been understood differently.

So the overall goal was use ISO 15926 to describe industrial instruments so that the information exchange could happen in the background.

Step One: Examine the System Landscape

The Company had already come up with its own list of terms that were associated with each item in its product line. Each term had its own ID number. Using this ID number, information exchanges within the company were much more reliable. But external business partners did not use this terminology and were not likely to adopt it.

One attempt at interoperability was to build software to communicate with commerical 3D design systems. ("Build a Decoder Ring" in the words of the project manager.) But several years and a great deal of money later, they had import/export with exactly one such commercial system. The Company did not want to have build that kind of a "Decoder Ring" for every software vendor. But if they used ISO 15926, they would only have to build one "Decoder Ring."

Step Two: Map Internal Terms to ISO 15926

• ...
• ...

Step Three: Pilot Study

• ...
• ...

Step Four: Production

• ...
• ...

Significance of this Project to ISO 15926

• ...
• ...

Project Execution

Resources

• People
  • one
  • two
  • three
  • ...

• Hardware
  • ?

• Databases
  • ?

Training Required

• ?

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