Vetco Aibel is a provider of project management, engineering, procurement and construction services, including EPC projects, process systems and equipment, maintenance, modification and operations to the upstream oil and gas industry. It employs more than 5000 people in 15 countries, and is, along with Vetco Gray, a subsidiary of Vetco International Limited.

Vetco Aibel has made good progress in the management and quality control of the vast amounts of information that are generated during the design of offshore facilities: information that is used for downstream activities of construction, commissioning, operations and maintenance. Historically at Vetco Aibel this has been achieved via in-house developed engineering information systems.
However the company believes that in order to build on that success in the future, it must innovate now.
"The industry has been grappling with the control and profitability of major fixed lump sum projects for some time -- but smaller projects related to modifications of existing facilities may also be challenging," says Trond Bynes, Vetco Aibel's vice-president for Operations Process & Facilities.
In Bynes' view, the engineering industry must rethink the way it does business: "Many companies still consider their proprietary IT systems as a business asset for competitive edge -- but proprietary systems make it more difficult to work collaboratively with the owner operator and other project contractors," he says.
Bynes believes that Vetco Aibel will derive much greater benefit -- and therefore a higher return on investment -- from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems.
In his view non-proprietary, COTS engineering systems can actually lower the cost of a project -- making the engineering procurement contractor's (EPC's) pricing more competitive, and therefore more attractive to the owner operator.

Challenging the industry norm

Vetco Aibel's approach contrasts with the current industry position where (typically) the owner operator and EPC systems interface to support an engineering project. The new approach being adopted by Vetco Aibel involves sharing engineering data openly with the client and extended supply chain, for the benefit of the project, and the industry as a whole.
This standards-based, information-centric strategy clearly demands a more collaborative approach from both EPCs and owner operators, but the rewards are worth it, according to Bynes. To make the point he uses the analogy of a Microsoft Word document that can today be used by almost anyone, anywhere.
"We believe that the age of proprietary engineering systems has come to an end", he adds. "Our ultimate vision is to be able to take engineering information from any company, anywhere in the world, add value to it, use it concurrently ensuring changes are managed and communicated, and perform downstream activities on the evolving information store.
"To achieve this we believe we need a strategic partnership with a global engineering IT company, rather than the traditional client -- vendor relationship. This engineering solution will be a key part of our business infrastructure -- the basis of our information exchange. We chose Intergraph Process Power & Marine as our IT partner. Intergraph shares our vision and commitment to industry innovation. Vetco Aibel will benefit from the reduced costs and advantages of a COTS approach and Vetco Aibel's industry knowledge will help enrich Intergraph's solution suite."

Measuring the benefits

Industry research1 proves the case for Vetco Aibel's strategy, revealing that engineering information handling and processing accounts for a significant percentage of the industry's capital and operating expense -- and that over 50percent of an engineer's time is spent looking for information or documents.
Research shows that the ability to re-use data from project to project can provide significant savings in capital expenditure and achieve faster design execution. For new projects the data-centric management of plant and project information can cut the cost of concept development by up to 30percent, while engineering efficiency savings of as much as 28percent are possible. Savings in commissioning of up to 60percent can also be achieved. Also, the cost of the IT that helps to make this possible can be up to 30percent cheaper.
Additional benefits are available for the owner operator in the downstream commissioning, operations and maintenance activities by delivery of the aas- built' information for use in the follow on stages -- also helping to reduce handover costs.
For a commercial solution to enable results of this kind it should be flexible: easily configured to optimise work processes for EPC businesses, adaptable to integrate the supply chain, and powerful enough to meet the owner's operational needs.
In implementing its new business model --centred on the plant life cycle, project data and the people that use it -- Vetco Aibel is migrating its engineering data from its existing proprietary information management environment to one provided by Intergraph, in which engineering information will be stored in industry standard formats that can be more easily shared by the owner operator, EPC and other contractors and extended supply chain in any project.
Vetco Aibel's new engineering management strategy is based on a combination of Intergraph's SmartPlant Foundation engineering data management and The Engineering Framework, Intergraph's integration platform for the process industries. This infrastructure will integrate engineering disciplines and work processes, and their interactions with other business systems, including materials management and procurement.
"The effect will be to create a single integrated lifecycle information system, based on industry standards, that will help us to meet customer demand for faster project delivery plus operations and maintenance support, at lower cost,", says Vetco Aibel IS manager Lars Line Vaaland.
The partnership is in its early phases. Vetco Aibel is putting in place a long term plan to transition from their in-house solution to the COTS environment. Existing projects will stay on the current systems. Business processes will be analysed, and the new solution will be gradually introduced on prioritised new project activities. In the meantime Intergraph has taken on support of existing systems.
To make the best use of plant information Vetco Aibel realises that it must know how, where, why and which business processes use that information - challenging traditional approaches in order to improve communications and obtain benefits across the supply chain. Managing consistency of information is fundamental.
For Vetco Aibel, during the dynamic engineering project phases when information creation and change are high, information generated by intelligent rules-based engineering applications will be captured, managed and shared across the Intergraph framework. Controlling the changes that occur during projects is a critical factor for EPC companies. Industry research shows that a significant proportion of this change or re-work stems from errors caused by usage of inaccurate and unreliable information. The Intergraph repository, which is dynamically managing the sharing of information across project disciplines and project parties, will ensure that Vetco Aibel's globally dispersed teams can rely on information integrity, so reducing the risk of increased costs and delays.
Vetco Aibel expects an initial 500 engineers to be using the system.

For more information, visit www.vetcoaibel.com or ppm.intergraph.com

1Coopers & Lybrand; Intergraph industry surveys