Many industrial plant managers suffer from the lack of an updated inventory of your assets. For years, industrial asset management relied on stacks of paperwork and spreadsheets to access the plant’s complete inventory. Therefore, this paperwork often took time to be updated.
With Industry 4.0 and digital transformation tools increasing in the world industry, companies with innovative solutions invested in software development. Therefore, those tools could integrate the industrial process and make it more accessible, efficient, and sustainable.
After the integration introduced by Industry 4.0 technologies was made possible. Some innovative companies invested in the digitalization of the PLM (Project Lifecycle Management). Divided into 6 phases detailing the lifecycle of an industrial plant (Design and Engineer, Contracting, Manufacturing, Installation, Operation and Maintenance, and Decommissioning). In other words, PLM data integration can bring value from one phase to another.
Project Lifecycle Management
The PLM, through data integration, shares information from the complete asset inventory with who’s in charge of the plant operation. In this rich data base, one can find crucial information, as:
- Materials specification for each element,
- Dimensions and geometrical data
- Engineering dataset
- Documentation
- Technical drawings,
I’ve talked more about the relation between the Digital Twin and the PLM phases. This article is published on my LinkedIn. You can click here to read this content.
In a 2017 text made by Oleg Shilovitsky, CEO of OpenBom, comments about the revolutions that a digital twin could bring for the industry:
Manufacturers can learn from the advantages of incorporating simulation in the design process by applying the same technique for managing factory facilities. These tools aren’t available yet, but soon manufacturers will be able to create a simulated digital twin of the factory. In doing so, bottlenecks and inefficiencies can be smoothed out to improve the working factory.
The comment from 3 years ago was already certain about the optimization digital twin can bring to the industry. For example, in a recent survey made with the Vidya Software, we identified some mislead information on the inventory dataset utilized by an offshore plant manager in the operation and maintenance phase. As a result, from 1024 inspected components, 58 of them or 5,6%, had divergences between engineering information and characteristics as-built.
The Digital Twin Revolution
The digital twin technology, makes a complete and real-time updated inventory of your assets become a reality. As a result, Vidya Software can create a flow of data and models from the first phases of the PLM (Design and Engineering, Construction). Collecting data, documents, models and technical drawings of the plant, to the Operation and Maintenance phase. Passing it trought the handover of the project, in conclusion, making it available in a Digital Twin. Moreover, the system can bring valuable data such as: dimension, position, structure type materials, TAGs, and many more.
In possession of the plant’s complete inventory, managers on the Operation and Maintenance phase can quickly reach essential information for inspection and maintenance activities. In addition, it’s possible to gather complementary information, such as element access, distances, as if is necessary IRATA or scaffolding to the execution.
The digital twin embedded in Vidya Software, enables the data exchange in a continuous flow between the physical object, and the virtual model. Consequently bringing existent data from the initial phase of the PLM to the Operation and Maintenance.
With 100% control over the industrial plant. Most importantly, with the possibility of making simulations and add execution plans (between many other attributes) to the elements. You can achieve a production much more efficient and sustainable. Vidya Software offers you that! If you want to access more data and results of our general presentation, you can download it here.
Thank you for reading until the end!
About the Author: Otávio Corrêa
