Every year, several billion dollars are invested in building new plants, revamping existing plants, improving safety
and environmental compliance, and increasing system reliability in the hydrocarbon and related process industries.
Still more is invested in asset management and maintenance.
But the challenges don’t stop there. Today, projects must be delivered cost effectively on ever-tighter schedules,
all while contending with critical shortages of skilled engineers. This scarcity of engineering resources affects
every phase of the plant from concept, through design and construction, to operations and maintenance. And
it impacts every link in the supply chain, including suppliers of plant equipment – which are reporting increased
lead-times even for common items such as valves and pumps. Securing materials and labor to deliver projects or
carry out maintenance is a critical success factor for businesses, and requires the efficient, effective sharing of
information among the multifaceted disciplines and companies involved in these efforts.
Because information generated by one discipline at a particular phase of an asset
lifecycle is not always shared or reused in another phase. businesses suffer from
inefficient use of capital, poor returns on investment (ROI), and increased risks in
the projects.
The pressures to make the right investment decisions earlier in a project are
increasing, and there are ever-fewer skilled resources available to make those
decisions. The process industries can improve business performance by adopting a
multidisciplinary, concurrent workflow to ensure engineering decisions made during
the front-end engineering phase of a project are based on sound asset lifecycle
knowledge and best design practices.
This white paper presents the approach taken by Bentley to address workflow
challenges faced by process engineers during front-end engineering.
