| 13 | | * A world-wide standard way to describe plant equipment. |
| 14 | | * The potential for automating repetitive tasks because the meaning of equipment attributes is accurately conveyed with the attributes themselves. |
| 15 | | * The ability to control the information that is publicly available. |
| 16 | | |
| 17 | | |
| 18 | | == A Standard Way to Describe Plant Equipment == |
| 19 | | |
| 20 | | Currently, a large portion of a sales engineer's time is spent reading datasheets sent for inquiry, propose equipment from his company's product line, and transcribing manufacturer's information onto customer's datasheets. With traditional tools, all of these tasks must be done by an experienced engineer. Every customer's datasheets are different, and we rely on context to determine the meaning of all of the terms. Of course there will be a core of information that is common to all datasheets of a particular kind of equipment, but every organization usually requires something a little different. (For example, some may want to know the color of paint on every control valve, others might not.) Worse, datasheets from a given organization may vary over time. The sales engineer, then, has to read every datasheet carefully to ensure the meaning of each attribute is fully understood. |
| 21 | | |
| 22 | | ISO 15926 will remove the routine parts of this cycle, leaving more time for the parts that take engineering judgment because: |
| 23 | | |
| 24 | | * It is a standard way to describe plant information, and |
| 25 | | * The standard description is in a form that a computer can understand. |
| 26 | | |
| 27 | | When both the customer and the OEM use 15926-compliant software, their respective datasheets will, essentially, only be user interfaces for their own personnel--other personnel will not be expected to read them. The data will move from the customer's application, where the design engineer will see it in her familiar datasheet form, directly to the supplier's application, where the sales engineer will see it in his familiar datasheet form. Because the ''meaning'' of each data value will travel with the data itself, software on the receiving end will know what each value is and will be able to route it to the appropriate spot on the sales engineer's datasheet. |
| 28 | | |
| 29 | | This works in the other direction as well. After the quotation is prepared, the sales engineer usually has to fill in some more attributes on the inquiry datasheets. With 15926-compliant software, the data values can simply be sent from the supplier's datasheets directly to the customer's datasheets. |
| 30 | | |
| 31 | | === Benefit: More Time to Sell === |
| 32 | | |
| 33 | | The average plant project has many thousands of tagged items that have to be individually specified and purchased. Each item goes to several bidders, who must each supply a sales engineer to read the datasheet, even for commodity items. This represents thousands of man-hours that will be able to be spent in more interesting and productive tasks. Freed from routine tasks, sales engineers will be able to spend more time dealing directly with customers and handling special requests. |
| 34 | | |
| 35 | | === Benefit: More Accurate Datasheets === |
| 36 | | |
| 37 | | When suppliers receive datasheets from engineers, it is typical for many of the terms to be left to the suppliers discretion. Design engineers fill in the terms they care about, letting the supplier fill in remaining terms. But a major source of liability for equipment manufacturers is properly interpreting customer-supplied information. With traditional methods relying on human interpretation, every interaction with a customer's datasheet is an opportunity for an error. With ISO 15926-enabled software, all the data values will be filled in correctly. |
| 38 | | |
| 39 | | == The Potential to Automate Repetitive Tasks == |
| 40 | | |
| 41 | | Currently, sales engineers are required to read and interpret inquiries for even commodity items because customers use datasheets that are different than the supplier's. ISO 15926 will essentially make the datasheets machine-readable. This means that preparing quotations for commodity items, things that are sold strictly on price or availability, can be fully or partially automated. Since the meaning of each data value is conveyed with the data values themselves, suppliers will no longer need a sales engineer to interpret datasheets. Software will be able to understand what the customer wants and prepare a quotation, or at least large parts of a quotation, for a sales engineer to review. |
| 42 | | |
| 43 | | === Benefit: Participate in More Bids, Faster and at Lower Cost === |
| 44 | | |
| 45 | | With ISO 15926-enabled software doing the first-pass classification, it will be possible for a given number of human engineers to participate in more bids. |
| 46 | | |
| 47 | | == Control the Information that is Publicly Available == |
| 48 | | |
| 49 | | Currently, suppliers to a plant project usually deal with an EPC rather than the end Owner/Operator. But from the supplier's point of view, one disadvantage not dealing directly with the O/O is that necessary information might not get through. The information that is of most value to a design engineer is different than what is of most value to an Owner/Operator. A design engineer wants to know things like "Is it the correct equipment" and "How big is it", while operators want to know things like "How can I keep it working" and "How can I fix it if it breaks". A major issue with O/Os is that the things it, the O/O wants, are not always provided from the EPC. With ISO 15926-enabled software, much of that information can be supplied with the original datasheet information. |
| 50 | | |
| 51 | | A major difference with a ISO 15926-enabled database will be the way it stores information. Currently, data dictionaries for plant equipment are very specific because the nature of the industry is that you must ask for every piece of information you want to deal with. But with ISO 15926 in place, software will be able to ask for ''everything'', with the user's datasheet only showing the bits that are interesting. |
| 52 | | |
| 53 | | An example: |
| 54 | | |
| 55 | | A given instrument for a plant project may have many hundreds of attributes that a manufacturer needs to know in order to build it. (Think: the composition, dimensions, and finish of every part.) But plant design engineers probably only need to know a couple dozen of these attributes, say, outline dimensions and a few process-dependent values. Owners will eventually need these same couple dozen attributes if they ever renovate the plant, but for normal operations they typically need a set of different attributes. Currently, then, the manufacturer supplies some information in the form of a datasheet, and some in the form of extra documentation. It is up to the EPC to keep the information together for final handover to the O/O. |
| 56 | | |
| 57 | | With ISO 15926 the information can be handled differently. Since all the information about a plant object is in a standard form it can ''all'' be transferred with the original datasheet download. The receiving software at the EPC can just accept all of it, while only displaying the couple dozen attributes of interest to design engineers. When the information is transferred to the O/O, again, the entire several thousand attributes, the O/O can look through it and pull out the maintenance information, even if the EPC's engineers never looked for it. |
| 58 | | |
| 59 | | === Benefit: More Control over Information Handover === |
| 60 | | |
| 61 | | The OEM no longer has to rely on the EPC to ask for the correct documentation, nor rely on it to turn it over to the O/O. Information of interest to the O/O can be embedded in the initial data download for the equipment, and when it is eventually turned over to the owner, it will be there. |
| 62 | | |
| 63 | | The OEM will have complete control over what goes into the data download. If it wants to turn over complete enough information to enable fabrication of replacement parts, it can; if it wants to keep certain information secret, it can. |
| 64 | | |
| 65 | | === Next === |
| 66 | | |
| 67 | | * [wiki:ISO15926Primer_Benefits_Software Primer: Benefits for Software Vendors] |
| 68 | | |
| 69 | | ---- |
| | 13 | * [wiki:ISO15926Primer An Introduction to ISO 15926] |
