Plant Design for Lean Construction at your fingertips An AVEVA Business Paper www.aveva.com
Contents Executive Summary Dispersed Decision Engine The Mobile Workforce Plant Design for Lean Construction Summary Page 3 4 6 7 9 Page 2
Executive Summary One area which can provide improvements to your adoption of Lean principles is the application of mobile tools to streamline the business processes of Engineering & Design. Make your decision makers and value-adding contributors from all departments and disciplines more effective and eliminate wastage by avoiding the delays in the design review and approval process. New technologies, more powerful mobile operating systems and powerful hardware can be employed to improve the availability of design decision makers and can provide a way to differentiate your business by reducing reworks in design, communicating more effectively across the design community and monitoring design progress to a broader team. As a new generation of engineers emerges into the senior decision-making posts, more demands will be put on IT solutions to provide simple, business-focused mobile solutions to meet their needs. The route to Plant Design for Lean Construction will be defined by your own organisation s willingness to relentlessly track down wastage and eliminate it, maximise efficiency and learn to respect the role of people in the transformation of the business. Mobile products for design review and approval will help to minimise time wasted due to absent decision-makers and will make the remote workforce more capable of running the office when they are not located in it. As a new generation of engineers emerges into the senior decisionmaking posts, more demands will be put on IT solutions to provide simple, business-focused mobile solutions to meet their needs... Page 3
Plant Design for Lean Construction at your fingertips - An AVEVA Business Paper Dispersed Decision Engine One of the most significant influences on modern working practices over the last 5 10 years has been the advent of mobile devices or, more precisely, mobile connection to resources and information from anywhere in the world, at any time. Office workers may still spend a great deal of their working lives poring through emails in their Inboxes but now much of this work is completed on the road, in front of the television with the family, on the train or in a hotel room. What mobile computing has done is to present an opportunity to continue to work outside traditional working hours and, in many cases, to help to present a new work/life balance. For many organisations this translates into improved productivity. Staff are both responding to work outside of their contracted hours and being given more flexibility in their work. Mobile computing has also presented a new opportunity to share information easily, not just through social networking tools but also through apps which allow access to information otherwise only available to colleagues using their desktop computers. The project execution environment is a perfect example of where mobile technologies can be effectively employed. The diverse and distributed nature of projects could almost be a design case for the application of mobile working. Many engineering designers are located in design offices around the world, using powerful desktop computers and fast LAN connections to their shared resources. Project planners and procurement teams are often also office based, using similar tools to achieve their tasks. Fabrication and construction teams are usually based away from the design offices, either on site or remote from the design centres, and are often using computers and shared file repositories or databases to access the design information across a WAN or the Internet. A significant proportion of these engineers and managers do not have access to the rich 3D tools that their designers use, and the means of visualising the plant design in 3D is not available to them. More and more frequently, many of the stakeholders in these projects are travelling or are away from their base locations for extended periods of time, whether visiting the client, meeting with subcontractors, on site or travelling to other project commitments. More often than not, it is the key decision makers and senior staff who are away from the office, and their contribution to the project and their decision making is lost to the design teams during these periods. In Lean terms, this is wastage any waiting or delay is an ineffective use of resources. The Distributed Project Execution Team Page 4
It is estimated that anywhere between 5 and 15 per cent of a design leader s time is lost due to their being unavailable to make decisions; this equates to one day per working month during which the project is significantly less effective. Naturally, this lack of access to key decision makers is counterbalanced by the work they are contributing to the project, such as bidding for new work, solving fabrication and construction issues, and managing client and partner relations. However, in our more connected environment there is no reason why they should not continue to contribute to design decision making during these periods. So what happens right now? Typically, design decisions which require review and approval are handled in regular review meetings, where key project stakeholders attend or dial-in to the meeting to review the status of the design. Design decisions which are needed on an ad hoc basis are often dealt with using traditional office tools such as phone, emails, WebEx and video conferencing. The telephone and email remain the most effective tools currently available to keep the design process moving at pace. There is, however, a significant drawback to these technologies they do not provide a centralised record of either the decision or the reasoning behind it. For example, a telephone conversation where the proposal to avoid design clashing was to move an access ladder to another location, would not be recorded as part of the design model s evolution. On one version of the design the ladder would be positioned in one place, and on the next it would have moved. For partners in the supply chain and other design disciplines this change would just have happened, and no reasoning or record of this decision would leave a trace in the design model. Emails go a long way to helping overcome this shortfall, as screenshots from the design model, corroborating information and details of the issue can be properly recorded in a threaded conversation to resolve the design issue. Furthermore, this conversation and the outcome are recorded and stored within the email system. However, using emails still leaves a gaping hole in the process of review and approval. Who records this email discussion? Who ensures that it is backed up? Typically, this is the responsibility of the IT team (and probably the IT team of each contracting organisation). The gaping hole is that this decision is stored remotely from the source design system, and no link is provided between the design change itself and the discussion which formed the change. In a very short time the decision, its supporting discussion, and the actual design change are unrelated and difficult to connect and are spread across numerous file, email and database systems. Emails held on multiple systems only help to distribute a process whose record should be centralised to the source system where the change manifested. For design to work at the pace defined by the project schedule, the dispersed decision makers must be provided with tools and technologies to help them to be the decision engine for the project. It is estimated that anywhere between 5 and 15 per cent of a design leader s time is lost due to their being unavailable to make decisions; this equates to one day per working month during which the project is significantly less effective... Page 5
The Mobile Workforce Many decision makers and senior design engineers already perform many work tasks when travelling or remote from the office; the mobile Inbox has been with us for many years. Being able to deal with some of the more trivial or transactional tasks is already supported. There is a new breed of B2B app, such as ERP, CRM and HR apps, which help to address business processes more directly. It is not common, however, for mobile tools to provide support for the less trivial engineering work tasks; those that require analysis, visualisation and calculation, for example. AVEVA believes that in the next three years the market will see an era of new apps providing greater support for B2B organisations which intend to arm their workers with powerful productivity tools. There are two catalysts helping to effect this change: z Mobile Operating Systems which can connect to the enterprise z Hardware which can support the varied needs of mobile workers. Apps which can connect to the enterprise Microsoft has slowly entered the app market with their Windows 8 OS platform, based on those currently used in almost every business in the world. Their recent purchase of Nokia and significant investment in the Surface product indicate their intention to tackle the dominance of Apple. In order for serious mobile/tablet apps to add value for the remote or travelling worker in the design and engineering phase of large capital expenditure projects, they must allow access to the main, mission-critical business systems such as 3D design systems. Since many of these systems are already managed on Microsoft server technology, apps which are developed using the Microsoft Application Framework will gain greater access and connectivity to these back-office systems. This greater access to resources such as the design and engineering databases will help to streamline review and approval processes for workers who are remote from the design office. Hardware powerful enough to support functionally-rich applications New technical developments and their subsequent productising into mainstream tablet hardware will help to provide more processing, memory and graphical capability to devices. This will open the door to some of the non-trivial work tasks such as analysis, number crunching, running simulations and visualising information in 3D. The latest generation of tablets are now matching the laptops of only a year ago, where HD output, touch screens and powerful, rich applications are available. A new expectation from workers To focus on the OS and the hardware is to overlook the biggest change for the adoption of business to business apps the users themselves. It is true that the vast majority of senior engineers are over 40 years old, but a study by b2bmarketing.net shows that, by 2025, 75% of workers will be Generation Y, and this age group think very differently from their older colleagues. Numbers of current engineers who can remember the drawing office filled with drawing boards are dwindling, while engineers who have only ever experienced life with connections to the Internet are rapidly increasing. This new generation of engineers is looking for ways to work more effectively, to use new technologies and to be more productive as a result. They regard their work and their personal devices as tools to get the job done as evidenced by the increase in corporations adopting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) attitude. This new generation of engineers is looking for ways to work more effectively... Page 6
Plant Design for Lean Construction AVEVA has set out its vision for Plant Design for Lean Construction, helping EPCs and Operators to eliminate wastage, to design, fabricate and construct more efficiently and to improve collaboration across partners and clients. AVEVA Everything3D provides a solid platform allowing engineers and designers to work concurrently across their disciplines, around the world, with the world s most efficient plant design tool. The guiding principles for Plant Design for Lean Construction are: z Respect for People everyone is accountable for improving the performance of the team. z Eliminate Wastage a no-tolerance approach to wasted time and materials. z Maximise Efficiency always improving the efficiency of valueadding activity. Helping the multi-discipline teams to work well together is a key area for potential improvement. Integrated tools, tools which are easier to use, and standardisation of information are all keys to unlock this potential. But mobile solutions can also provide an important ingredient to help organisations to execute Plant Design for Lean Construction. In order for these solutions to be effective they must exhibit some or all of the following: Security The mobile solution must provide a secure way to connect to design data; authenticated accounts and encryption of the information transmitted are minimum hygiene levels. AVEVA has set out its vision for Plant Design for Lean Construction, helping EPCs and Operators to eliminate wastage, to design, fabricate and construct more efficiently and to improve collaboration across partners and clients... Page 7
Managed data disclosure The ability to manage both the level of access and the privileges of users, roles and organisations is essential to protect Intellectual Property (IP), to avoid unauthorised access and to ensure that the digital asset is protected under the same rules as those defined in the contracts. Access to real-time information Mobile solutions must help remote workers to feel connected to the office by providing live information just as they would expect when in the office. Being remote from the office should not mean being remote from information. Information presented in the right context Being able to visualise the plant design model in its 3D context with associated design information is important to allow the consumer to better understand the information and make better decisions. Simply pulling together information in the form of lists and tables does not correctly inform the design review process. Clear understanding of information status When mobile devices are being used in the decision-making process these tools must offer a clear view on the status of the information. Understanding the level of approval of the information enables appropriate decisions. Resilience to network connectivity The solution must provide a good user experience even when the connection to a network is lost. Losing work from network interruptions is one of the most important influencers on whether users return to the application. Simple and powerful user experience The mobile solutions must provide a user experience which helps the user to be as productive as possible, providing a compelling interaction. Capabilities must not be limited to viewing information only. In order to streamline business processes, users have to be able to contribute to existing processes. Mobile solutions must help remote workers to feel connected to the office by providing live information just as they would expect when in the office... Page 8
Summary Over the last ten years, mobile computing has been a global phenomenon, transforming our daily lives, but it has not had a significant effect on improving the productivity of our working lives. Most mobile apps are for leisure or product positioning; very few are true work productivity providers. This will change over the coming years. Tablet hardware is already becoming more powerful and able to cope with the richer processing needs of our business tools; software will take advantage of these new resources and Cloud adoption will provide an enabler for remote workers to connect properly to their businesses. Improvements in the graphic capability of these mobile devices will liberate the plant design model to a wider audience across partners and clients. AVEVA recognises this trend and will provide tools to help accelerate the review and approval process, to reach out to the decision makers who are not always available in the office, and to provide a new level of collaboration across design and engineering teams. The new AVEVA mobile app will help to improve project decision efficiency and remove the wastage associated with absent remote or travelling decision makers. The new AVEVA mobile app provides opportunities for you to work more effectively, differentiate your business and provide richer experiences with your clients. Tablet hardware is already becoming more powerful and able to cope with the richer processing needs of our business tools; software will take advantage of these new resources and Cloud adoption will provide an enabler for remote workers to connect properly to their businesses... Page 9
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