Plant management of the next generation

At the “International SAP Conference for Oil and Gas” conference, DSC demonstrates integrated solutions for plant management of the future – implemented with SAP ECTR

From March 28–30, 2017, T.A. Cook hosted the “International SAP Conference for Oil and Gas” conference. Under the motto “Powering the Next Generation”, the conference took place this year in Lisbon (Portugal): with 300 to 400 expected visitors, mainly IT and business professionals of the oil and gas industry. In the accompanying trade exhibition, DSC Software was represented with its own stand – right next to “Meet the Experts area Oil and Gas”. The DSC team presented SAP Engineering Control Center – SAP ECTR – as a flexible key technology for future-oriented solutions for Asset and Asset Information Management, fully integrated in the SAP system: from plant planning and development to operation and maintenance. What such a solution can look like in practice was shown by the best-practice presentation of the DSC customer Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest companies in the oil and gas industry. This took place on the last day of the conference at 12:15 as part of “Track 2: Operational Excellence”.

All in all, DSC was very satisfied with the event. The large number of people who specifically visited the DSC stand were very impressed by SAP ECTR and the solutions demonstrated. Not least because SAP ECTR has made it very simple to use SAP in the technical environment – true to the DSC motto: “We make Engineers want SAP”. The DSC customer lecture also turned out to be a magnet for visitors. Moreover, it was listed after the conference in the online acknowledgements of the organizers as one of the highlights of the event.

SAP ECTR as a key technology

SAP ECTR is an important module of the range of PLM solutions from SAP. SAP ECTR offers integrations for many leading authoring tools from CAD to MS Office. It also enables and simplifies the management of all kinds of documents as well as their linking with SAP master data: for example from material management, preventive maintenance, plant, quality and project management, or order management. It thus actively assists plant management business processes.

Furthermore, the functionality of SAP ECTR for plant manufacturers and operators is ideal: whether in areas such as engineering, procurement, and building, or industrial branches such as oil and gas or energy and public utilities.

The reason: SAP ECTR considerably simplifies the presentation of large and complex structures. Intelligent filter and reporting mechanisms make the creation and management of structures much easier. The graphic navigation for plant, design, project, equipment and other SAP data eases day-to-day work and minimizes error sources.

  •  Intuitive SAP cockpit with graphic navigation including hotspots for SAP master data
  •  Graphics-supported asset browser for the easy mapping of comprehensive structures
  •  Compressed display of large data volumes on the basis of flexible figures (KPI)
  •  Easy document management including viewing and drawing hot-spotting
  •  Directly integrated project, quality, audit and procurement management
  •  Simple monitoring of manufacturing orders including material management
  •  Convenient live tracking and real-time reporting plus targeted status analyses

Best-practice example from the oil and gas industry

“Developing a Collaborative Hub to Manage Digital Assets Better for Owner Operators” – that was the title of a lecture by Ibrahim Mohammed Al Khodairi, manager of the specialist team for project quality and asset information management at Saudi Aramco. For 30 fascinating minutes, Al Khodairi talked about the implementation of an integrated enterprise project management solution for investment building projects of self-operated plant. This links business and engineering systems and thus creates the basis for consistent data integrity and topicality all along the entire plant project lifecycle (plan – build – operate). That enables more efficient collaboration of all project participants (both internal and external) and guarantees reliable handovers. These not only ease quality, audit and procurement management, but also produce more security for commissioning and operation

A core component of the solution is Asset Information Management (AIM). To achieve this, all plant-related information in the SAP system is managed by SAP ECTR, including data objects such as equipment, functional location, document info record, project definition, project structure, network, network activity, material master, inspection batch, quality notification, audit, order, purchase request, etc. This leads to a secure, complete and structured digital asset repository. Furthermore, with an intuitive AIM cockpit, SAP ECTR offers a comprehensive work environment and collaboration platform for project managers, engineers, and designers. This help to secure completeness and compliance of asset records. Moreover, it returns real-time plant data, which simplifies project tracking and monitoring and also accelerates decision processes.