BE Magazine - Volume 6, Issue 1 - (Page 38)

Best Practices – Power Generation Aging Power Station Boosts Engineering Productivity Standardizes and consolidates business process controls and document-handling systems n the world energy market, Eskom—South Africa’s stateowned power company—ranks 7th in electricity sales and 11th in electric generation capacity. The 85-year-old utility produces 95 percent of South Africa’s electricity. In late January of 2008, after operating on narrow reserve margins for some months, Eskom announced that it could not guarantee power to its customers. The result was a ﬁve-day shutdown of South Africa’s mining industry. That, in turn, caused a precipitous drop in gold and platinum production and a ﬁrst-quarter economic slowdown of 3 percent. Eskom restored power to its customers and, after three months of rotational load-shedding, it had rebuilt its coal stock levels and ramped up maintenance activities at its 26 power stations. The crisis illustrated what can happen when a utility is forced to run power stations at maximum capacity over prolonged periods and the associated risk of postponing routine maintenance. Eskom realized that improving operations and maintenance efﬁciency was essential to preventing similar situations in the future. I BE AWARD FINALIST Integrated Engineering Management System for Eskom Lethabo Power Station Organization: Eskom Category: Innovation in Power Generation At Eskom’s Lethabo Power Station, business unit resource planning has improved the engineering department productivity by 30 percent. The power station management team uses an integrated engineering management system, powered by ProjectWise, to standardize and consolidate engineering business process controls and document handling systems. The system provides full visibility into engineering information, enabling administrators to work 50 percent more efﬁciently. “We consolidated many disparate systems, lowering our IT maintenance and support costs,” said Riekie Swanepoel, chief technologist at Eskom Lethabo Power Station. “Engineering information is now in one repository, providing major savings in productivity of the engineering staff.” In the past, the ability to trace the probable cause of plant outages had been hindered by the inaccessibility of engineering information. Plant maintenance projects had been delayed when necessary engineering documents were either not found or found to be outdated. Scheduling planned maintenance and plant shutdowns had become problematic, and cost estimates proved inaccurate. To demonstrate how an integrated engineering management system would address these issues, the engineering system project team developed a prototype solution in 15 days using ProjectWise as the core platform. The results convinced the business unit’s management team to approve rapid deployment of a full-scale solution in October 2006. A vast portion of historical engineering and plant information had to be retroﬁtted prior to integration with the system, but the team preserved data integrity through a thorough quality assurance process. Over the course of the project, 120,000 engineering drawings, 30,000 component datasheets, 4,000 plant modiﬁcations, 7,000 technical documents, 2,750 plant procedures, 6,800 incident occurrences, and various policies, standards, speciﬁcation, and inspection reports were indexed into ProjectWise. Engineering documentation and drawings linked to plant tag numbers facilitate systemwide searches for information pertaining to speciﬁc areas of the plant. Workﬂow and user management controls provide document security ensuring plant modiﬁcations are properly evaluated, reviewed, and approved. With two Lethabo engineers and four consultants working full-time on the project, the integrated engineering management system cost approximately $553,000 to complete. By April 2008, 12 months after implementation, the system had already delivered a 57 percent return on investment. Digital plant aspects of the initiative are expected to be completed by March 2009, delivering unprecedented visibility of engineering data for informed decision making and more effective engineering activity and knowledge management. This includes a plant walkdown to verify as-built status and creating the associated intelligent P&IDs as well as internal boiler 3D modeling in PlantSpace and a 3D laserscanning exercise in the boiler plant area. “Very few utilities running for 20-plus years have undertaken this type of initiative. Our project has been equated to being similar to an ERP implementation. Given the limited resources deployed on the project, this was no mean feat,” Swanepoel said. The electricity emergency that precipitated economic distress in the ﬁrst quarter of 2008 focused South Africa’s attention on how to avoid another crisis. With an installed capacity of 3,708 megawatts, Lethabo Power Station provided a proven implementation model for integrating and optimizing plant engineering activities as well as a feasible retroﬁt approach to build a “digital plant” of a power station more than 20 years old. This initiative has put Eskom is in a position to introduce an integrated engineering management system approach throughout its power supply system using its existing installed base of Bentley solutions and products as well as deployment of similar technology solutions. 38 Be Magazine | Volume 6 Issue 1 http://www.bentley.com/en-GB/Products/projectwise project team collaboration/ http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Products/Plant Design and Engineering/

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of BE Magazine - Volume 6, Issue 1

BE Magazine - Volume 6, Issue 1 Contents Anticipation’s Name Is V8i Be Awards of Excellence Kicks Off Competition Bentley Launches the Most Comprehensive SoftwarePortfolio for Infrastructure Ever Assembled in a Single Release MicroStation V8i Up Close & Personal Is Water the New Oil? How Does Intent Become Reality? Does Performance Create Sustainability? Renewing Confidence in Public Highway Infrastructure Enterprisewide System Manages International Airport Standardized CAD/GIS Platform Streamlines Infrastructure Engineering 3D Modeling Refines Reusable Design for Plant Prototype Lean Teams Deliver Automotive Assembly Plants Through Innovative Use of BIM Integrated 3DModels Enable Compact and Safe Plant Design Sustainable Development Supports Thriving Community Terminal Pumps Natural Gas Through Longest Subsea Pipeline Large UtilityWorks To Reduce SO2 Emissions Aging Power Station Boosts Engineering Productivity Hydropower Dam To Fuel Growing Economy Collaboration Tools Accelerate Chinese Railway Electrification System Design Rapid Rail Link To Meet Socio-Economic Development Goals High-CapacityWastewater Treatment Facility ReclaimsWater Resources City ExpandsWater SupplyWithout Deploying AdditionalWater Resources Private Calling Meets Public Service Learning Paths Map Skill Development for Infrastructure Professionals A Contemporary Approach to Site Design The Art of Visualization Special Feature: Be Communities Physical + Digital Investments = Intelligent Infrastructure

BE Magazine - Volume 6, Issue 1

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